



V 




Class 



* 3sts 



PRESENTED by 



..,4 



THE VICTORY 



DIVINE GOODNESS; 

INCLUDING 

I. LETTERS TO AN INQUIRER ON VARIOUS 
DOCTRINES OF SCRIPTURE; 

II. NOTES ON COLERIDGE'S CONFESSIONS OF AN 
INQUIRING SPIRIT; 

III. THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF 

THE ATONEMENT 

AND OF ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 



T. It. BIRKS, M.A. 

INCUMBENT OP HOLY TRINITY, CAMBRIDGE: 
AUTHOR OF "THE DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF," &C. &C 



RIVINGTONS, 

Hontton, (ByiovXf, attfc Cambridge. 

1867. 



^ ■ 



Gift 
m Smith 
March 15, 1934 






CONTENTS. 



LETTER I. 

PAGE 
INTEODTTCTOEY 1 



LETTER II. 

LIFE AND DEATH — CEEDTTLITY AND SCEPTICISM 10 



LETTER III. 

THE HISTOEY OF THE FLOOD 



LETTER IV. 

THE CANAANITES 



LETTER V. 

ON FTJTUEE PUNISHMENT 41 



LETTER VI. 

THE STATE OF THE DEPAETED 50 

^ ~~ A 2 



CONTENTS. 



LETTER VII. 

PAGE 

MUTUAL RECOGNITION 58 



NOTES ON COLERIDGE'S "CONFESSIONS OE AN INQUIRING SPIRIT" 65 



THE NATURE AND EFFECTS OF THE ATONEMENT 147 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT 167 



PREFACE. 

This little Volume,, in its object, though, not in structure, 
is a sequel to the "Difficulties of Belief/'' and the " Ways 
of God/' published some years ago. It consists of three 
parts, distinct from each other, and written at long in- 
tervals ; but their common aim, like that of the two 
previous works, is to throw light on those difficulties by 
which some of the main doctrines of Christian revela- 
tion are often clouded and obscured in thoughtful minds. 
The First Part consists of Letters to an Inquirer, 
written more than seven years ago. A gentleman of rank, 
to whom I am still personally unknown, but who had 
found help from some of my works, addressed to me a 
paper of inquiries on several topics which had caused him 
either perplexity or distress. Its cautious and reverent 
tone claimed from me a deliberate reply in several letters, 
which now appear, slightly revised for the press, in their 



original form. They were written under the impression 
that their publication might be desirable for the sake of 
others, while passing through a similar stage of mental 
conflict. Some remarks in the fifth letter will explain 
my chief reason for the long delay of seven years. It 
seemed to me that thoughts there condensed into a 
few pages, the fruit of long and painful meditation, 
needed some special call of Providence to justify me in 
giving them to the public. On that sclemn topic it is 
dangerous to speak, when Scripture, on the surface at 
least, appears to keep silence. The fallen heart is only 
too prone to find excuses for deadening and abating 
the force of the solemn warnings of God. 

This scruple, after seven years of waiting, when 
almost thirty years have elapsed since the vista of 
thought itself was opened to me, has now been overcome 
by still weightier motives. The subject has of late been 
revived, and has acquired new prominence among the 
theological and ecclesiastical controversies of the present 
day. Any contribution, in a reverent and cautious spirit, 
to the guidance and relief of perplexed minds, is now 
more seasonable than ever. The thoughts in the letter, 
and partly those in the supplement, by transmission or by 
conversation, have been given privately to various friends 



or perplexed inquirers, and they contain fertile seeds of 
truth, not likely to remain dormant when once received. 
Thus the only probable result of further delay would be 
their first presentation to the Christian public under forms 
or with associations which I might esteem undesirable. I 
believe that the obligation of caution and reverence has 
been fulfilled by seven years' and even thirty years' delay. 
It remains for me now to fulfil the duty of a " steward 
of the mysteries of God/' by imparting to the Church, 
in their simplest form, those meditations, deeply rooted 
in Scripture, yet found only beneath its surface, which 
tend to throw light on the darkest and most solemn 
portion of Divine revelation. 

The Second Part consists of marginal comments on 
Coleridge's well-known little work, " The Confessions of 
an Inquiring Spirit." These were written soon after 
the first edition of the book appeared, more than twenty- 
five years ago. They were shown to his daughter, Mrs. 
S. Coleridge, when she was preparing the second edition, 
by a common friend. Several pages of her long supple- 
mentary note, in 1849, are an attempted reply to some 
of these criticisms, to which she alludes very courteously 
in these words : — 

"I have lately perused an interesting manuscript, 



commenting on the Confessions, written by a decided 
dissentient from the views of the author, but a fair and 
straightforward one, who sometimes, / tliinlc, mistakes 
the true import of those views, but never wilfully mis- 
represents them. This critique is written in so good a 
spirit, shows so much acuteness and knowledge of Scrip- 
ture, and enters on the examination of my father's little 
work in so elaborate and legitimate a manner, that I 
cannot help wishing the author would revise and publish 
it. I have no stronger desire with regard to the letters 
than that they should be subjected to close and searching 
honest criticism/'' 

The wish so courteously expressed by Mrs. Coleridge 
seventeen years ago, even while battling eagerly in her 
text for the view I have opposed, is now fulfilled 
long after her own decease. * Very few and slight 
corrections have been made in these Notes, and so much 
of the Confessions is quoted as seems needful to explain 
their application and reference. The controversy has 
grown in importance since Coleridge's little work ap- 
peared. The cloud, like a man's hand, has almost over- 
spread the firmament. The question of the true autho- 
rity of Scripture claims more and more the careful study 
of every Christian, who would not drift away, in utter 



PREFAQE. IX 

uncertainty, from the old landmarks of the Christian 
faith. Some of the thoughts in these Notes have been 
introduced, either in my Lectures on Rationalism, or in 
"The Bible and Modern Thought." Still there may 
be not a few who will read them with more interest in 
their original form of a hand-to-hand controversy with 
the most celebrated, eloquent, and fascinating patron, in 
modern times, of the eclectic and intermittent theory of 
Bible inspiration. I had prepared some remarks on 
Mrs. Coleridge's attempted answer to some of my state- 
ments. But, on further thought, it seemed to me 
that her criticisms scarcely need a reply, and that the 
space might be more profitably employed in another 
way. 

The Third Part consists of a double supplement, on the 
Nature and Efficacy of the Atonement, and on Eternal 
Judgment. The former topic has been treated before 
in chap. vii. of the "Ways of God," but briefly and 
imperfectly, so that the real nature of my view has been 
liable to be misunderstood, alike by those who have 
blamed and those who have approved. I trust that I 
have now made it much plainer than before. I believe 
firmly that the view here proposed is the full and 
faithful result of an inductive and careful studv of 



the word of God, and tends to remove much of 
the ambiguity and confusion, which still rests, in many 
devout minds, on this central and vital doctrine of the 
Christian faith. 

The other Supplement, in this Third Part, unfolds 
more fully the view propounded in the fifth and seventh 
letters. The subject is the most solemn, the most 
humbling, and the most awakening in the whole compass 
of the word of God. It is one on which my own 
thoughts were sorely, deeply, and continuously exercised 
more than thirty years ago. Every attempt to throw 
further light on its solemn mysteries appears to me to 
demand, not only reverence and humility, but a caution 
and rigour of thought, an exclusion of all mere conjecture 
and fancy, like that which is required in the most exact 
researches of physical science. This cautious mind 
seems to me doubly essential in dealing with aspects of 
Divine truth which lie beneath the surface of Holy 
Scripture, and of which it cannot be affirmed that they 
are distinctly " read therein," but only that they " may 
be proved thereby." I trust that the remarks I now 
offer, a partial expansion of the statements in the letter, 
from which my own spirit has found relief and comfort 
for the last thirty years, will be found to satisfy these 



conditions of reverent inquiry into the deep things of 
God. Other lines of thought, converging on the same 
result, might have been also unfolded, but appear to me 
still unsuited for general publication. But if the Church 
is now approaching, or has almost reached, the time when 
" the mystery of God shall be finished," we may expect 
that new unfoldings of revealed truth, and of the deep 
treasures in the mind of Scripture, will be given to 
humble and waiting hearts in these last days. 

Cambeidq-e, Jan. 12, 1867. 



LETTEE I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



My dear Sir, 

Your letter of inquiry opens a wide range of 
subjects, on which you ask for help to relieve your secret 
perplexity. Each of them is of high importance, and 
may well repay a careful examination. Those which 
come first in order are not difficulties in Scripture itself, 
but only doubts with regard to statements or phrases 
current among religious teachers, of which you are not 
satisfied that they have any Scriptural warrant. It 
ought, however, to cause us no surprise, should partial 
error be found to mingle with popular expositions of 
Divine truth, even by good and holy men. We all, 
in our present state, see " through a glass, darkly," and 
the wisest and the best have much to learn in the deep 
things of God. With regard to all such human expositions 
our double maxim should ever be — " To the law and to 
the testimony" — " Prove all things, hold fast that which 
is good/'' Still, the topics themselves are of great 
importance, and our view of them must influence the 

B 



8 INTRODUCTORY. 

whole tone of our thoughts in our review of Scripture 
difficulties. I will offer a few remarks on each of them, 
as they appear in your letter. May the Spirit of truth 
and wisdom preserve me from error, and make my words 
a help to the full establishment of your heart in the 
knowledge of God, and of Jesus Christ our Lord. 

I. Salvation, you remark first of all, is in your view 
too noble a boon to man to be limited within the pale 
of one Church, or section of a Church. You hold the 
Romish faith in abhorrence, for its temporal aggressive- 
ness and its persecuting spirit. But still, to your mind, 
a Roman Catholic, or Nonconformist, or any person 
sincerely believing in Revelation, is equally likely to 
gain eternal life as the most orthodox member of the 
Anglican Church. And you seem to fear that this 
judgment may be censured for latitudinarian laxity by 
many good men whose general sentiments you would 
approve. 

Here, in avoiding the worse and more dangerous 
extreme, you incur some danger of falling into the other. 
The key to a right judgment on this vital question will 
be found in three passages of the word of God, Acts x. 
34, 35. Rom. ii. 11 — 16 ; iii. 1 — 3. It is easy to err on 
either side. All that is essential to salvation is practical 
godliness, or repentance towards God and faith in the 
Lord Jesus Christ : that is, a heart that relies on the 
mercy of God in Christ, and desires earnestly to learn 
and to do His will. However imperfect the light, where 
those marks are found, the soul must enjoy the favour 
and blessing of God. And yet a pure communion and a 



INTRODUCTORY. O 

full creed, free from serious error, must be great and 
important helps to the attainment of living 1 piety. To 
be " saved/'' and to " come to the knowledge of the truth/-' 
are in the Scripture two phrases almost convertible. 
But it must be much harder to lay hold upon saving truth, 
whenever the soul is shut in with an atmosphere of false- 
hood and superstition. On this point Baxter has well 
observed — " We may say of every error and sin, he that 
is saved must be saved from it, at least from the power 
of it on the heart, and from the guilt by forgiveness. . . . 
Many do hold things which by consequence subvert 
Christianity, and yet do hold Christianity first and faster, 
in heart and sincere practice, and would renounce their 
error if they saw the inconsistency. That which they 
hold first and fast and practically, doth save them from 
the power of their own opinions, as an antidote or 
strength of nature may save a man from a small quantity 
of poison. . . . No man will be saved for being no Papist, 
much less for being a Papist. And all that are truly 
holy, heavenly, humble lovers of God, and of those that are 
His servants, will be saved. How many such are among 
the Papists God only knoweth, who is their Judge/" 

A Divine antidote to all religious bigotry meets us at 
the opening of the Gospel, when it was first preached 
to the Gentiles ; and proceeds, under the teaching of the 
Holy Spirit, from the lips of that Apostle, whose name 
has been perverted into a plea for the worst excesses 
of bigotry in the Church of Borne. " Of a truth, I 
perceive/" said St. Peter to Cornelius, "that God is no 
respecter of persons ; but in every nation he that feareth 
b 2 



INTRODUCTORY. 



Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him." 
The degrees of light, we are thus taught, may vary 
widely ; but for acceptance with God two things alone 
are required, a genuine fear or reverence of God in the 
heart, and its natural fruit, the working of righteousness, 
or a spirit of practical obedience to the Divine will. 
Thus Cornelius was accepted with God, even when his 
religious knowledge was small, at the time when he 
received the angelic vision. And still the description 
given him of the message the Apostle was to bring is 
this — " Who shall tell thee words whereby thou and thy 
house shall be saved." When he sought God earnestly, 
though in mist and twilight, with fastings, alms, and 
prayer, his acceptance and salvation were begun. But 
when the person and the work of our Lord were distinctly 
made known to him, and received with explicit faith, the 
germ, became a plant, the embryo a visible birth, and 
salvation came to his house with a clearness and fulness 
of blessing unknown before. Thus the morning twilight 
suffices for vision, but not for clear vision, and derives 
all its power to dispel the darkness from the still unrisen 
sun. 

On the other hand, when the possibility of salvation 
under imperfect forms of faith or profession is made a 
warrant for religious indifference, an opposite statement 
is given us in the word of God, to expose the dangerous 
error. When the Apostle St. Paul had laid down the 
same truth anew, that God is no respecter of persons, 
that the unrighteous Jew would be condemned, and the 
upright and pious Gentile be accepted and justified, he 



INTKODUCTOUY. 5 

pauses in his argument to meet an objection that might 
arise, as if the external profession were a matter of entire 
indifference. " What advantage, then, hath the Jew ? 
or what profit is there of circumcision?'''' And he gives 
a brief and decisive answer — " Much, every way : chiefly 
because unto them were committed the oracles of God." 
It must be hard to lay hold on saving truth, when men 
are shut in by an atmosphere of falsehood and super- 
stition. A pure communion, and a creed free from 
serious error, must be great helps to the attainment of 
real and living piety ; but, above all, the gain is immense 
whenever men have free access, in their own tongue, 
to the written word of God. 

II. Again, you think that Evangelical teachers, from 
their very earnestness, are prone to overstate and prove 
too much. Salvation is represented as almost impossible 
of attainment, and Almighty God as an implacable 
Judge. Men are repelled by a picture so appalling, and 
drive the subject from their minds, in the vain hope of 
quenching the anxiety all rational beings must feel to 
penetrate into the mysteries of the world beyond the 
grave. 

There may be some Evangelical teachers, at least some 
who pass under the name, to whom this censure justly 
applies. There is a form of high Calvinism, indeed, which 
robs those who hold it of any Gospel or glad tidings to 
preach directly to every sinner. But this is the exception, 
perhaps the rare exception, and not the rule. In these 
days it is possible that an opposite charge may be more 
widely true, of dwelling on the freeness of Divine grace, 



b INTRODUCTORY. 

without any full statement, like those in the Scriptures, 
of the difficulties and hindrances in the way to heaven. 
The usual tone of the best modern teaching is hardly so 
startling, or so adapted to awaken caution and holy fear, 
as the words of the Apostle, " If the righteous scarcely 
be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner ap- 
pear ?" These words of our Lord himself, far more 
than the imperfect comments of men, are likely to repel 
by their seeming severity : — " Wide is the gate, and broad 
is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there 
be which go in thereat; because strait is the gate, 
and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few 
there be that find it." The usual defect of Evangelical 
preaching is not that the way of ruin is described as 
broader, or the way of life more narrow, than these 
words imply. It is rather that the excellency of the 
promised salvation, the love of the Father, the grace 
of the Redeemer, the power and help of the Comforter, 
are not set forth in all their mighty attractiveness of 
Divine love ; so as to persuade and compel the hesitating 
soul to yield itself up to the gracious invitation, and 
to press onward, with earnest desire, towards a prize so 
glorious. 

III. Again, you have heard preachers, in their excess 
of zeal, assert that we are now more favourably circum- 
stanced than Christ's own contemporaries and disciples. 
How, you ask with some perplexity, can tradition be 
more convincing than ocular evidence ? 

Occasional overstatements from the lips of preachers 
ought never to occasion serious perplexity in a thoughtful 



INTRODUCTORY. 7 

mind. Those who protest against the infallibility of 
the Bishop and the Church of Rome can never dream 
that every zealous clergyman or minister is infallible 
in his public ministrations. But in this case I believe 
that the statement which has startled you is strictly 
true, when a little reasonable explanation is given. 

Tradition, it is true, is weaker in its own nature than 
ocular evidence. But the difference in some forms of 
tradition may "be so slight as to be almost imperceptible, 
and be far outweighed by the increase of other evidence 
in the lapse of time. Most persons of intelligence are 
just as firmly convinced of the past existence of Julius 
Caesar, his invasion of Britain, his victory at Pharsalia, 
and his death in the senate -house, as of the existence of 
Napoleon, his victory at Austerlitz, his defeat at Water- 
loo, and his death at St. Helena. Yet one series of 
events is almost within our own lifetime, and the other 
full nineteen centuries ago. Where events have a cer- 
tain degree of publicity, and involve momentous con- 
sequences, the influence of time in weakening the evidence 
of their reality may be practically insensible. The 
impression will be more vivid when miracles are actually 
witnessed, but the conviction of their reality may be 
no less deep and firm when they are reported by witnesses, 
and confirmed by collateral proofs, which cannot de- 
ceive. 

Consider, now, the immense gain on the other side. 
The Gospel has been confirmed by all the further evidence, 
derived from the predicted unbelief of the Jews, the fall 
of Jerusalem, the ruin of the Temple, their exile and 



O INTRODUCTORY. 

wide dispersion, and their long desolation of eighteen 
hundred years. Predictions have been since fulfilled 
in the wide diffusion and triumphs of the Gospel, and 
the extensive corruptions of the Christian faith. The 
secret stores of truth and wisdom in the Holy Scriptures 
have been unfolded, through sixty generations, by the 
writings of thousands of pious and holy men. Ten 
thousand hearts have given their testimony to the power 
of the Gospel, and have proved, by their own experience, 
its transforming and quickening energy. The whole 
history of almost two thousand years has confirmed the 
truth of the Divine record, and points onward to a time, 
drawing nearer and nearer daily, when the Lord Jesus, the 
true Messiah, owned already by the mightiest nations 
and empires of the earth, shall receive the heathen for 
His inheritance, and the utmost ends of the earth for His 
possession. The slight loss, in the substitution of tra- 
ditional proof for present miracles, is far outweighed 
by the gain which the mass of new evidence supplies, 
and makes the obligation still more binding on ourselves 
than on the Jews and heathens of the first century, to 
own in Jesus of Nazareth the true Messiah, the Son 
of God, and the Saviour of the world. "Blessed are 
our eyes, for they see, and our ears, for they hear/'' Our 
age, it is true, has its own temptations, and the down- 
ward path of unbelief remains broad and easy, as in 
the days of old. But still the evidence of the Gospel is 
cumulative, and grows in fulness from age to age. 
The means of grace are dispensed in unequal measure to 
different lands, and the Church may have winter and 



INTRODUCTORY. 9 

summer alternately in its moral history. But the helps 
which God has given us in these days, at least in our 
favoured country, for learning to grasp the truth of His 
word and the glory of the Gospel, are greater than those 
of the first disciples, or of any previous age. They will 
leave us doubly without excuse, if we turn our backs 
upon its light, and exchange it for the bondage of 
mediaeval superstition, or for the cheerless speculations 
of men who live " without God in the world." 
I remain, yours faithfully, 

T. R. Birks. 



LETTER II. 

life and death credulity and scepticism. 

My dear Sir, 

Original sin is the next subject to which your 
letter refers, or the question, What are the effects of 
Adam's sin on his posterity? I have written on this 
subject at some length in the "Difficulties of Belief/' 
and am glad to learn that your perplexities have been 
much lessened by my remarks, if not wholly removed. 
If the line of thought there unfolded is Scriptural and 
solid, as I fully believe, the chief perplexity to the con- 
science will disappear, however deep and various the 
mysteries which still cluster around the ways of God in 
the primitive constitution of the human race. But there 
are two other subjects which call for remark, before I turn 
to those of still higher importance, where the statements 
of Scripture, rather than the sayings of uninspired 
teachers, occasion difficulty in your mind. 

IV. You ask, first, if it is right and wise to represent 
this world as wretched and illusive, and one from which 
our hearts ought to be longing hourly to be released. 



LIFE AND DEATH. 11 

In this case, where is the benefit of existence ? Can a 
benevolent Creator have designed His creatures to be so 
miserable on earth, that they should be unceasingly 
desirous of ending their lives ? Would not such a view 
either produce a cold scepticism, or drive us into a cloister? 
You think that there is a partial truth in such represen- 
tations ; but still you cannot reconcile what you some- 
times hear from Evangelical preachers with just views of 
the Divine benevolence. 

The tone of thought which you condemn is no charac- 
teristic of Evangelical teaching, but belongs rather to a 
monastic and mediaeval theology. Yet, even in these 
days, statements may often be made by religious persons 
on the duty and excellence of a longing desire to die, for 
which the general tenour of Scripture gives no warrant. 
It is a serious defect in our popular theology that death 
has been made to occupy the place which the Bible 
every where assigns to the great contrast of death, the 
resurrection. Our hymns and popular treatises abound in 
this substitution, which distorts and obscures, even when 
it does not subvert and destroy, the whole outline of the 
Christian revelation. The word of God every where repre- 
sents death as a great enemy to be overcome, and life as a 
rich boon from God, but resurrection as a boon far nobler 
and higher. In the histories of the Bible, there are many 
cases where good and holy men — Moses, David, and 
Hezekiah — express a strong desire to live ; and one only, 
that of St. Paul, where a like desire to die is commended 
or approved. The impatience of Job and Jonah, and 
even of Elijah, is rather a beacon for our avoidance than 



12 LIFE AND DEATH. 

a pattern for our imitation. And what were the circum- 
stances under which the Apostle's desire was expressed ? 
It was at the close of a long course of zealous, active, 
and exhausting labours in the cause of Christ. He was 
now " Paul the aged/' a prisoner in bonds for the Gospel, 
wearied deeply in spirit by the spectacle of idolatry and 
vice in Rome, the great sewer of heathen immorality, 
the stronghold of Satan's kingdom, and by the heartless 
selfishness of false brethren, who sought to add affliction 
to his bonds, and preached even Christ of envy and ill- 
will. It is when he is more than sixty years of age, and 
more than twenty-five years from his conversion, after he 
has fully preached the Gospel from Jerusalem round about 
to Illyricum, that the expression of such a desire is first 
heard from his lips. It is the only instance of the kind 
in the whole compass of the word of God. But there 
are hundreds of passages where the continuance of life, 
or recovery from the brink of the grave, is declared 
to be a token of the Divine favour and blessing. All the 
works of healing wrought by our Lord himself, the 
raising of the widow's son and the son of the Shunamite 
in the Old Testament; of the daughter of Jairus, the 
young man of Nain, and of Lazarus, in the Gospels ; and 
of iEneas, Tabitha, and Eutychus, in the early church, 
are clear proofs that a desire to " live and declare the 
works of the Lord " is the rule, and a longing for death 
is only the rare exception, in the healthy course of Chris- 
tian experience. Even in the chapter which follows the 
mention of his own desire to depart, St. Paul himself 
alludes to the recovery of Epaphroditus from a dangerous 



LIFE AND DEATH. 13 

illness as a just cause for his own joy and deep thanks- 
giving before God. 

The neglect of pious Christians, in modern times, to 
draw their views direct from the word of God, and their 
readiness, on this subject, to content themselves with Pro- 
testant traditions, received at second hand from hymns 
and religious manuals, has overlaid the Church with a 
large amount of sickly, unreal, sentimental feeling, for 
which the Scriptures themselves give no warrant. The 
habitual confusion of the comfort vouchsafed to the dying 
believer with the glorious hope of the resurrection, has a 
powerful tendency, among religious persons of a sensitive 
and morbid temperament, to multiply cases of indirect 
and virtual suicide. A style of thought, borrowed from 
the early Gnostics, as if only the presence of the body 
hindered the spirit from soaring straightway into the 
highest heaven, has widely replaced and almost reversed 
the tone of deep humility, of silent reserve, and of patient 
waiting for a coming resurrection, which marks all the 
utterances of the Holy Spirit respecting those who are 
gathered to their fathers in peace ; or who, in the still 
more cheering language of the New Testament, " die in 
the Lord/'' and " sleep in Jesus/'' 

At the same time, it is doubtless true that ripening 
Christian experience, a clear view of the excellence of the 
perfect life to come, and yearning of the soul for nearer 
communion with the Lord himself, will awaken such a 
feeling of unrest in the mortal body of sin and death, as 
to produce, first of all, a willingness (2* Cor. v. 4. 8), and 
perhaps still later, a desire and longing (Phil. i. 23), even 



14 LIFE AND DEATH. 

before the resurrection, to be " absent from the body" and 
thus, in a fuller sense than on earth, " at home with the 
Lord/'' Life in itself is a precious gift, and death in itself 
a sore and hateful enemy. And yet, as the Red Sea and 
Jordan were driven backward, against their natural course, 
to make a pathway for the ransomed to pass over ; so, in 
the progress of the work of redemption, the natural 
course of human instinct may for a time be reversed, 
until there is a pleasure in laying down, for Christ's sake, 
that outward life which has been marred and corrupted 
by the entrance of sin. The adversary, Death, may then 
be hailed as a reluctant slave, employed by the Lord 
himself to open a door, which admits the soul nearer to 
His own gracious presence. 

V. You inquire next, whether it is not unwise to say 
that " death has no terrors to the real Christian believer."" 
Here you refer to the frequent instances of wicked men 
who have no bands in their death, but meet it with un- 
flinching hardihood ; and contrast this with the admissions 
of some good men, that " it is an awful thing, full of 
perturbation." 

You have good reason, I think, for your dislike and 
distrust of the broad and strong statements on this 
subject which have been too often made. The Gospel, 
it is true, provides the Christian with a firm hope beyond 
the grave, and with sure promises of help and comfort in 
a dying hour. The very purpose of our Lord's coming was 
" to deliver those who, through fear of death, were all 
their lifetime subject to bondage." We are taught to 
look forward to a time when the enemy shall be destroyed, 



LIFE AND DEATH. 15 

and swallowed up in an eternal victory. But still the 
dissolution and corruption of the body, and the unclothing 
of the spirit, are one main part of God's original curse 
and sentence upon sin. They are meant to convey a 
needful lesson of deep and intense humiliation. How 
can Christians, in the words of the Apostle, be " con- 
formed to the death of Christ/'' when they speak of their 
dissolution in language of unmingled desire and gratula- 
tion ? while their Lord (< offered up prayers and supplica- 
tion, with strong crying and tears, unto Him that was 
able to save Him from death/'' and was heard for His deep 
reverence. The character of our Lord's death, as the 
great propitiation for the sin of the world, makes it 
doubtless a contrast in some respects to that " falling 
asleep " which is one usual phrase, in Scripture, for the 
death of believers. But still the conformity to His 
death, of which the Apostle speaks, must surely require 
in the people of Christ a measure of humiliation in their 
experience and anticipations of death which may bear the 
like proportion to their promised bliss, as the agonies of 
our Lord to His infinite and eternal glory. 

There is a phase of religious thought, too prevalent in 
these days even among pious men, which overlooks and 
slurs over the deeper lessons of the word of God. The 
work of salvation is described as finished and complete 
when hardly begun, and the duty of rejoicing in the 
Gospel is urged in such a way as almost to expunge the 
graces of godly fear and Christian reverence. Death 
may have ceased to be terrible to the Christian believer, 
but it is still most solemn. Its sting may have been 



16 CREDULITY AND SCEPTICISM. 

wholly taken away ; but its shadow remains, and he has 
still to walk through the valley on which its shadow 
rests. The Bible has nowhere told us that sudden death 
is sudden glory. Such phrases have no harmony, either 
with the unforced instincts of humble and reverent 
hearts, or with the solemn record of the dying agonies of 
the Son of God. 

VI. In the Preface to the " Difficulties of Belief the 
remark occurs, that "there are some whose childlike 
faith is content to follow the plainer lessons of natural 
conscience and of Christian revelation, without being 
ever troubled by the deep shadows that lie around them." 
Is not this, you ask, credulity rather than faith ? Would 
not such persons, if born Buddhists or Mahometans, 
place equal reliance on those false creeds, because they 
were those of their own parents and countrymen ? The 
honest Christian seeks for proofs in support of his faith, 
or how hope to make converts of subtle though false 
reasoners ? 

The contrast to which I allude is not between faith 
and scepticism, or credulity and the love of truth, but 
between two opposite habits of mind, which have credulity 
and scepticism for their vicious extremes. I assume that, 
in the present creed of both classes, some things are 
comparatively plain and certain, and others doubtful or 
obscure. There is daylight, if not sunlight, in the centre 
of the landscape, while the horizon is shut in with clouds 
and darkness. And there may be found two opposite 
tendencies in Christians equally pious and sincere. Some 
instinctively confine themselves to the practical applica- 



CREDULITY AND SCEPTICISM. 17 

tion of the plainest truths, and are even ready to condemn, 
as rash presumption, any attempt to pierce through 
the clouds that lie in the further distance. . Others, on 
the contrary, have a deep longing for increase of light. 
Every cloud in the horizon seems to them like a thick 
veil, obscuring the light of God's love, and hinders 
them from reposing, with the full assurance of peace and 
hope they desire to attain, on the perfect wisdom and 
goodness of the Almighty. One instinct is more safe, 
but the other is more honourable. One is content to 
till the soil immediately before him ; the other, with peril 
and hazard, seeks to bring in rich pearls and treasures by 
crossing seas of dangerous navigation. The same con- 
trast is found in the business of outward life. Our 
country might be ruined, if all, in their love of adventure, 
were to leave the farm and quiet homestead, and become 
Arctic voyagers. But it could never have attained its 
wealth and greatness, if the spirit of enterprise had not 
always led many of its sons to prefer a sea life, with all 
its hazards, to the quiet round of home occupations, to 
the work of the ploughman and the shepherd. Neither 
tendency is sinful in itself, but only in the excess. When 
the Christian is so content with the first elements of 
truth he has received, as to accept passively the opinions 
that float around him, and never to exercise his own 
thoughts on the deeper mysteries of creation, providence, 
and redemption, his religion will soon degenerate into 
mere formalism, his seeming faith into blind credulity. 
On the other hand, when young and ardent minds, with 
little reverence or humility, rush into the pathways of 

c 



18 CREDULITY AND SCEPTICISM. 

metaphysical speculation, unconscious of the danger 
which besets them, alike from the narrow limit of their 
understanding, and the secret moral obliquity of the 
sinful heart, they are only too likely to lose their way, and 
to make shipwreck of their faith on the dark mountains 
of pride and unbelief. 

We admire the heroism of the navigator, when, after 
proposing to himself some noble and worthy object, he 
uses all prudent foresight, provisions his vessel for the 
voyage, provides himself with best instruments, chart 
and compass, sextant, telescope, and chronometer, and 
faces with calmness the dangers that are unavoidable, 
because he is conscious that no needless risk has been 
incurred. But we justly condemn the rashness of him 
who throws away his own life and the lives of his crew, 
with a total neglect of due precaution, and in proud 
contempt of real danger, in order to gain a reputation 
for bold and hardy enterprise. The same contrast applies 
to the case before us. It is a noble enterprise to extend 
the boundaries of religious truth, as apprehended by 
ordinary Christians, and to clear away some of those 
clouds which obscure from their minds the full vision of 
the wisdom and goodness of the Most High. But the 
price which must be paid in such an effort is a closer 
conflict than other Christians may have to undergo, with 
questionings and difficulties, and dark and gloomy 
* thoughts, which, like the sons of Anak, resist the entrance 
of the soul into the good land of promise. To embark 
on such a voyage, or engage in such a warfare, in a spirit 
of vain self-confidence, is rash and sinful, and may often 



CREDULITY AND SCEPTICISM. 19 

have a ruinous and fatal issue. Our minds may easily 
be dazzled and confounded, and our steps may slide in 
slippery places, when we gaze, without deepest reverence 
and prayer for light, on the mysteries of life and death, 
the fall, redemption, and eternal judgment. Those 
Christians may seem almost to be envied, who till their 
own little homestead, and never launch their bark on the 
wide and trackless ocean that leads to undiscovered 
truths. This childlike faith has a beauty of its own, but 
a manly faith is still more excellent and beautiful. The 
little children, soon or late, must rise unto the experience 
of the young men in Christ, who are strong and over- 
come the wicked one through a larger indwelling of the 
word of God, before they can attain the last and highest 
stage of the " fathers," whose hearts and minds are fully 
" established with grace," because they have learned to 
" know Him that is from the beginning. " 

I remain, yours faithfully, 

T. R. Bieks. 



c 2 



LETTER III. 

the history of the flood. 

My dear Sir, 

The difficulties you have first mentioned arise 
from the sayings of good men, with which you find it 
hard to agree. This, however, may be due in part to 
their mistakes, and not wholly to any defect in your own 
clearness of vision. Those which remain are still more 
serious, because they result directly from the express 
statements of the word of God. I have reflected on 
most of them for many years, and trust that some light 
has been given me which may help to remove your per- 
plexities. May the Spirit of God give us a right judg- 
ment in all things, and fulfil the promise of our Lord, by 
guiding us into all the truth of God. 

I. The history of the Flood is your first difficulty ; not, 
however, in its physical, but in its moral aspect. You 
allude especially to *Gen. vi. 6 : " It repented the Lord 
that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him 
at his heart/'' How are we to reconcile this with God's 
foreknowledge, who must have foreseen this very depra- 



THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. 21 

tf . 

vity? You suggest that perhaps He cut off those 
delinquents in mercy, to save them from further sin, and 
will hereafter allow them to partake in the forgiveness 
purchased by the blood of his Son. But you add that 
we have no certain ground for this hope. And even if 
we seek thus to reconcile the Flood with the Divine 
benevolence, the difficulty from the Divine omniscience 
is still unsolved. 

Here three distinct questions arise. The first relates 
to the Divine immutability, the second to God's benevo- 
lence, and the third to the final state of those who 
perished in the Deluge. 

1. Now, first, it is plain, when we compare other 
passages, that the statement which has caused perplexity 
is no mistake or careless oversight. A similar statement 
appears elsewhere, in close connexion with the fullest as- 
sertion of God's immutability. In 1 Sam. xv. ] 1. 29. 35, 
we read, within a few verses, that " it repented the Lord 
that he had made Saul king;" and still that " the Strength 
of Israel will not lie nor repent ; for he is not a man, that 
he should repent." The same pointed contrast appears 
between Exod. xxxiv. 14; Num. xiv. 34; and Num. 
xxiii. 19. It is written in Genesis that " God did tempt 
Abraham." Yet the same Apostle, who appeals to this 
chapter in proof of a great doctrine of the faith, assures 
us just before that " God cannot be tempted with evil, 
neither tempteth he any man." These verbal contradic- 
tions are thus introduced, of set purpose, by the Spirit of 
God, in order to compel a closer study and fuller appre- 
hension of the Divine messages. Thus, in the stereoscope, 



22 THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. 

the twin pictures are purposely made discordant when 
viewed separately; that by their combination, when 
viewed together in the true light, the object they repre- 
sent may stand out in clear and bold relief. 

Again, if we examine the context, it is plain that an 
absolute repentance of the work of creation cannot be 
the true meaning. The promise has been already given, 
and solemnly recorded, that the Seed of the Woman was 
to bruise the head of the Serpent. Enoch has already 
been translated, because he walked with God. A waiting- 
time of 120 years has just been announced, which implies, 
like all other chronological prophecies, a fixed and settled 
scheme of Divine government. Almost in the next verse 
an exception to the sentence of judgment is revealed, a 
channel through which the work of redeeming mercy 
may flow on even to perpetual generations : " Noah found 
grace in the ej^es of the Lord/'' The whole context, then, 
demands that the words be read with some implied 
limitation. 

The harmony between the opposite statements, in this 
and similar passages, is not hard to discover. When we 
are told that " the Strength of Israel will not lie nor 
repent ; for he is not a man, that he should repent/'' the 
reference is either to the whole counsel of God in its 
completeness, from eternity to eternity, or to an un- 
conditional declaration of some part of that eternal 
counsel. When He is said to repent, the words refer to 
some special plan or course of action, having some defi- 
nite object, which the sin of man may frustrate, even 
although this relative and partial frustration is one fore- 



THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. 23 

seen part of the scheme of Providence. In the gift of a 
king to the Israelites, the proper and direct object was 
twofold, that he might snbdue their enemies, and gnide 
them in obedience to the laws of God. The first object 
Sanl had fulfilled for a time, but the second and higher 
was set aside and reversed by his self-will and dis- 
obedience. Hence it was that the reign, which began so 
brightly, set in clouds and storm. He who had given 
them "a king in his anger," after their own heart, 
"took him away in his wrath" (Hos. xiii. 11). The 
kingdom was then transferred to David, the man after 
God's own heart, who would fulfil all His will. 

The passage before us admits of the same explanation. 
The direct purpose to be fulfilled in man's creation was 
twofold — his own happiness and his Creator's glory. 
Both of these objects were now frustrate for a time 
through the fearful abounding of wickedness. Man was 
made wretched, while the earth was filled with violence ; 
and God was dishonoured by foulest blasphemies, when 
every imagination of man's heart was only evil, and that 
continually. If the world were viewed with reference to 
its actual state alone, apart from the issues in the far 
distance, the very same motives which had prompted the 
great work of creation must now have caused the Holy 
Creator to wish the work undone. We can only rise to a 
just and true conception of the Divine character by sum- 
ming up all the various revelations of His mind and will, 
occasioned by the diverse characters and moral states of 
men, and the successive stages of the world's history. The 
word of God announces each of these in its turn. By 



24 THE HISTORY OE THE FLOOD. 

comparing Scripture with Scripture, we must learn to 
combine them in one stereoscopic view, which may 
embrace the whole landscape, and reveal to us, in clear 
and full outline, the harmonious perfections of the Thrice 
Holy, the Almighty, and the All- wise. 

These words, which have occasioned your perplexity, 
have long been, to my own mind, a peculiar source of 
comfort and mental repose. Abstract statements of the 
Divine immutability, through the dimness of our facul- 
ties, now impaired by sin, tend rapidly to produce an 
immoral fatalism, deadening to the conscience, and de- 
structive of all spiritual, life. Of all temptations to 
which men are exposed, this is perhaps the most universal 
and the most dangerous. It is common to all classes, 
the Christian divine, the sceptic philosopher, and the 
unlettered peasant. What will be, will be, and cannot 
be altered ; so that we may fold our arms, and float icily 
down the stream of time. The positive philosophy of 
our own days is based, almost throughout, on this main 
fallacy. The laws of progress, it affirms, are fixed and 
immutable. The will of the individual is itself a mere 
product of outward circumstances, and is powerless 
amidst the tide of antecedents and consequents, which 
moves on with perpetual flow. And thus men are always 
blameless, whatever the amount of their seeming crime. 

The same evil was rife, in the times of the Captivity, 
among the ancient Jews. "If our transgressions and 
sins be upon us," they cried, P and we pine away in them, 
how should we then live ? 33 Similar statements may often 
be heard on the lips of the poorest and most ignorant, to 



THE HISTOEY OF THE FLOOD. 25 

excuse their neglect of the laws of Christian morality, and 
of the welfare of the immortal soul. In " Queen Mao/' 
Shelley's beautiful but hateful poem, the same thought 
underlies and sustains a large superstructure of blas- 
phemy : 

" Spirit of Nature, all-sufficing Power, 
Necessity, thou Mother of the world, 
Unlike the God of human error, thou 
Requir'st no prayers or praises . . . the slave 
Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world, 
And the good man . . . are equal in Thy sight." 

A cold and heartless philosophy is ever attempting to 
seat this gaunt and lifeless spectre, this blind Fate, under 
such titles as the Deity, the Absolute, the Soul of the 
world, in the temple of the true and living God. And 
the text in question is a flaming sword, placed at the 
very entrance of Scripture, like the cherubim at the 
eastern gate of Paradise, to guard it from the inroad of 
so fatal a delusion, and thus to "keep the way of the 
tree of life." The conception of sin really perishes when 
we cease to look upon it as grievous in the sight of God, 
and conceive that all events and all passions, because 
they exist, are alike acceptable and pleasing in His sight. 
It is one mark of the deep wisdom which pervades all 
Scripture, that so near its opening there should be found 
that firm and full protest against every form of immoral 
fatalism which this verse supplies to every thoughtful 
reader. Here we leave behind us all those dreary counter- 
feits of a cold-hearted philosophy, which usurp and profane 
the titles of the Most High. We learn that we have to do 



26 THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. 

henceforth with a living" God, a righteous Governor of 
the world, who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, 
and whose holy eyes sift and search, with intense dis- 
crimination, all the works and ways of sinful men. 

2. But a second difficulty may arise from the same 
narrative. How are we to reconcile a destruction so 
extensive and universal with just views of the Divine 
benevolence ? 

The difficulty here seems to lie in our slowness to admit 
the truth, that evil can be so intensely evil as to require 
that God himself should deal with it in this way. For if 
we only assume that warnings and long-suffering patience 
have been used to the uttermost, then even benevolence 
must prescribe that incorrigible transgression should be 
punished, rather than the Divine glory should be wholly 
blotted out, and mankind be given up to the triumph of 
evil, and total ruin. The moral of the history, if we 
accept its natural construction, is clear and plain. For- 
bearance had now been carried to its furthest limit. Only 
one righteous household was left. The same forbearance, 
if continued further, would have issued in a state of 
wickedness strictly universal. The seed of the righteous 
would have perished, the great end of creation been re- 
versed, and the scheme of redemption have come abruptly 
to a dark and fatal close. It is because the judgment had 
been delayed so long under sorest provocation, that, when 
once it began, it needed to be so complete. Once for all, 
this Divine perfection, the long-suffering of God, needed 
to be carried to its furthest extent, and on the largest scale. 
But the costly and solemn experiment was never more 



THE HISTORY OF THE ELOOD. 27 

to be repeated. An earlier interference, by local and 
partial judgments, would hereafter prevent the growth 
of an apostasy so wide-spread and entire. It must be 
hard for creatures, sinful themselves, to attain a due 
sense of the stubbornness and malignity of moral evil in 
its more extreme and aggravated forms. But the facts 
which a mournful experience has revealed in later ages, 
and their long and dark succession of crime, should 
prepare us to admit the truth which is implied in 
these earliest pages of the word of God. There may 
be places and times when the infliction of severe and 
righteous judgment on hardened transgressors fulfils, 
instead of reversing, the laws of a true benevolence. A 
world of rebels can never be governed by sprinkling it 
with rose-water. There is a feeble, sickly sentimentalism, 
which shuts its eyes to the depth and inveteracy of 
moral disease in sinful hearts, and only aggravates the 
evils it pretends to cure. But perfect goodness must 
include the widest extremes of moral excellence, the un- 
bending sternness of just severity against obdurate evil, 
and the tender compassion which revealed itself in the 
tears of our Lord at the grave of Lazarus, and over guilty 
Jerusalem. 

3. The third question involved in your inquiry relates 
to the final state of those who perished in the Deluge. 
Were they cut off, you ask, to keep them from further 
sin, and will they be allowed hereafter to partake in the 
forgiveness purchased by the blood of Christ ? 

Here two questions very different need to be distin- 
guished from each other. The first refers to the likeli- 



SO THE HISTORY OP THE FLOOD. 

hood of repentance when the Flood was coming on the 
earth; and the other, to the possibility of those who 
have died impenitent obtaining a second probation. 

For this latter view I can see no warrant in the word 
of God. On the contrary, it seems to contradict and 
annnl the natural force of its solemn and repeated warn- 
ings, like those words of the Apostle : " Behold, now is 
the accepted time ; behold, now is the day of salvation ! " 
The whole drift of its teaching is summed up in the 
statement, — "It is appointed unto men once to die, 
and after this the judgment." The account by which 
the state is fixed, is of the " things done in the body, 
whether they be good or evil." 

On the other question, however, Scripture seems to 
give some little light. St. Peter, in a well-known pas- 
sage (1 Pet. iii. 18 — 20), tells us that our Lord, in His 
spirit, " went and preached unto the spirits in prison ; 
which sometime were disobedient, when once the long- 
suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the 
ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, 
were saved by water." 

The application of these words to the preaching in 
spirit in the person of Noah does plain violence to the 
context and the grammatical force of the terms. Two 
journeys of our Lord are mentioned in succession, one 
after His death, the other after His resurrection ; one to 
the spirits in prison, the other to the right hand of God 
and the spirits of Light in God's presence, " angels, and 
authorities, and powers being made subject unto Him." 
The spirits visited are those who " sometime were dis- 



THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. 29 

obedient/'' — that is, not at the time of the visit itself, but 
at a period implied to be much earlier, the days of 
Noah. The contrast in the double statement of St. 
Peter respecting this double journey answers to the 
words of St. Paul on the same subject : " Now that he 
ascended, what is it but that he descended first into the 
lower parts of the earth ?" In a first journey of descent, 
our Lord preached to the spirits in prison ; and then, by 
a second journey, He ascended on high, is gone into 
heaven, and seated at the right hand of God. 

The true meaning, then, seems to be that, of those 
who perished in the Flood, some, and perhaps many, 
repented when the judgment came suddenly upon them, 
and all hope of outward deliverance had passed away. The 
ark of Noah did not and could not receive them. Its 
door had been shut by the hand of God. To these, we 
are taught, in the region of departed spirits, our Lord, 
after His death, announced His own finished sacrifice ; 
that those who had repented at the last, but for whom 
the ark could supply no escape from the waters, might 
obtain a better ark of refuge in the Saviour's covenant 
of redeeming love. 

The same view will explain the obscure verse in the next 
chapter : "For this cause was the Gospel preached also to 
them that are dead, that they might be judged according to 
men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." 
The dead here, contrasted with the living, must naturally 
mean those who were in the state of the dead when this 
message came to them. It sounds like an unexpected 
and mysterious extension of the Gospel message, so that 



30 THE HISTORY OP THE FLOOD. 

not living men alone, but the departed also, came directly 
within the range of its proclamation. The change was 
to affect their state, not in the sight of men, but of God 
alone. The men in the days of Noah, the dwellers in 
the cities of the plain, the Egyptian host, the Canaanite 
armies, to the eye of men were all swept away in one 
indiscriminate judgment. Yet in each case there may 
have been a secret and powerful work of repentance, by 
which a remnant turned to God in the hour of calamity 
and desolation. To all such the message of mercy might 
come, when our Lord, in His separate spirit, preached to 
the dead, to the spirits in prison ; and the destined result 
was attained, " that they might live according to God in 
the spirit,"" or gain a firm hold on that Saviour and His 
finished sacrifice ; on whom, as the promised Seed of the 
Woman, with a dim and starlight faith, they had learned 
to put their trust in the hour of judgment, when all 
their refuges of lies were swept away. 

Such I believe to be the true and natural sense of 
this controverted passage. And if it be asked why, in 
this case, the antediluvians alone should be named, since 
the message could scarcely be limited to them alone, the 
answer is clear. The Spirit of God, by the Apostle, 
would reveal the comprehensive character of the work of 
Christ, by teaching us that it extends backward even to 
the earliest generations of mankind. He is not called 
the second Noah, but the Second Man, the last Adam. 
His work of redeeming mercy is not arrested in its back- 
ward course by the waters of the Flood, but extends to 
righteous Abel, to the sainted Enoch, and to all those 



THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. 31 

who were outwardly involved in the universal Deluge, 
but whose secret repentance was known to the eye of 
God alone. That great work includes all states of men, 
living or dead, and all ages of mankind. How grand, 
how solemn, this brief announcement of so wonderful a 
truth ! 

I remain, yours respectfully, 

T. R. Birks. 



LETTER IV. 



THE CANAANITES. 



My dear Sir, 

II. The destruction of the Canaanites is a second 
subject which has caused you perplexity in the state- 
ments of Scripture, along* with the kindred history of 
Agag and Samuel. These acts, you say, were "so 
totally at variance with our Blessed Saviour's injunctions 
in every page of the New Testament, that it does not 
seem enough to say a new dispensation took effect after 
He came on earth, and that fresh laws were then framed 
for mankind/'' This would be to liken the Omniscient 
and All-merciful to a fallible mortal, who, finding that 
one system fails, has recourse to another. This difficulty 
has been constantly urged by unbelievers, and has 
perplexed multitudes of devout and pious Christians. 
It has thus a powerful claim on thoughtful minds for 
patient and careful examination. 

Your remark suggests two distinct but closely related 
inquiries. Do the commands in Deuteronomy and the 
facts in the Book of Joshua contradict the uniform 



THE CANAANITES. 33 

teaching of the New Testament ? And next, are they a 
fatal objection to the Divine mission of Moses, or else 
to the truth of the record, because they oppose the firm, 
unalterable laws of true morality ? 

1. You seem to assume that these commands are in 
direct contradiction to the whole tenour of the New 
Testament. The same opinion is often held by those 
who take up with loose and hasty impressions. A closer 
examination will prove the reverse. The New Testa- 
ment, from first to last, recognizes and confirms the 
Divine authority of this portion of God's word, and 
implies or affirms that these were commands really 
addressed to the Israelites by the living and almighty 
God, which it would have been sinful rebellion in them 
to disobey. 

And, first, let us turn to the narrative of our Lord's 
temptation in the first and third Gospels. The tempter 
is thrice repelled by the simple words, "It is written." 
The written word is thus made a decisive authority in 
all questions of moral right and wrong. And what are 
the passages to which this solemn appeal is made ? They 
are Deut. viii. 3; vi. 13; and vi. 16. In other words, 
they are sentences from two chapters, which include 
between them a most distinct and earnest command to 
root out and destroy the tribes of Canaan. How could 
our Lord more solemnly endorse the obligation of these 
intermediate commands, than by His threefold ajypeal to 
that very portion of God's law where these commands 
are given, in order to repel and defeat the most subtle 
onset of temptation from the great enemy of mankind ? 



34 THE CANAAOTTES. 

Again, in the Sermon on the Mount our Lord appears 
as the Great Lawgiver, and meets the doubts that might 
arise in the minds of his disciples from the seeming 
divergence between His own teaching and the voice of 
the Old Testament. « Think not/' He says, " that I 
am come to destroy the law, or the prophets : I am 
not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say 
unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one 
tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be 
fulfilled."" And thus, by the voice of our Lord himself, 
a rejection of the Divine authority of these very com- 
mands would consign those who practise it to an inferior 
place in the kingdom of God. 

Again, if we consider the verses vii. 19. 23. 27 in the 
same discourse, or Matt. x. 15. 28; xi. 21 — 24; xii. 32; 
xiii. 40 — 42. 50; xviii. 7—9. 34; xxi. 44; xxii. 7; 
xxiii. 27 — 36, in the same Gospel, their severity is an 
exact counterpart to these commands in Deuteronomy. 
In the discourse of St. Stephen, and in that of St. Paul 
at Antioch, the destruction of the Canaanites is plainly 
ascribed to the command of God. The same lesson is 
taught by the references to the Flood, to the destruction of 
Sodom, and to the judgments on Pharaoh, which occur so 
repeatedly throughout the New Testament — Heb. xi. 7. 
1 Pet. iii. 20. 2 Pet. ii. 5. Luke xvii. 27. 2 Pet. ii. 6, 7. 
Jude 7. 

There is a partial contrast, no doubt, between the tone 
of the Old and the New Testament. " The law was given 
by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." 
But this partial contrast, when we look below the surface, 



THE CANAANTTES. 35 

is based upon a deep and real harmony. The grace of 
the Gospel is implied and even expressed (Exod. xxxiv. 
4—7. Deut. iv. 81; v. 29; viii. 5; x. 18) amidst the 
sterner messages of the Law, and the severity of the 
Law mingles repeatedly with the gentle accents of the 
Gospel— Mark xvi. 16. John iii. 36; xii. 39, 40. Rom. 
ix. 22; xi. 8. 21. 2 Cor. ii. 15; v. 11. Rom. ii. 8, 9. 
Heb. xii. 29; x.-26, 27. The judgments which fell on 
the Jews for their rejection of the Saviour were scarcely 
less severe than those which their fathers had been 
charged to execute on the Amorites. The moral diffi- 
culty lies impartially against the whole course of God's 
moral government, as revealed in Scripture, and is by 
no means confined to the history in the Book of Joshua 
alone. 

2. But it may be urged that these judgments, how- 
ever consistent with each other, contradict every true 
conception of the Divine mercy. This objection has 
been often made, and often answered. A little calm 
reflection will show that it derives its force from a 
neglect of some of the clearest lessons of experience, 
and of the contrast between primary and secondary or 
dependent laws of moral obligation. 

A sentence of death, duly executed upon sin, is the 
constant law of God's moral government of mankind. 
To deny it is to contradict all experience, or else involves 
a creed of blind fatality which is virtual atheism. The 
suddenness of the judgment, and the use of human 
agents, are here the only peculiarities. In the course 
of a century the very same persons would have been 
d 2 



•36 THE CANAANITES. 

cut off by a gradual work of God's judicial visitation, 
common to all races and ages of mankind. 

Next, when the object is to make a deep moral 
impression, a simultaneous judgment is far more effective 
and awakening than one which is gradual and successive. 
Common observers, in one case, fail to learn any lesson 
whatever; while, in the other, the most careless are 
aroused, and see the hand of God. How different is 
the effect of a sudden shipwreck, where hundreds perish 
in a moment, or of a pestilence that sweeps off thousands 
in a few days, from the silent and gradual ravages of 
disease and death ! When the object is to awaken a 
sense of God's anger against sin, and of certain judgment 
on the obstinate sinner, the suddenness of the infliction 
is almost essential, that the moral object may be fulfilled. 

All judgments, again, which are righteous on the 
part of God, must claim a righteous sympathy from 
every creature whose vision is not blinded by sin. It 
is those acts only which are unjust, capricious, devoid 
of love and wisdom, which it is wrong to approve. 
Growing holiness must imply increasing sympathy with 
all the ways and counsels of the Holy One, and growth 
in goodness, a fuller and ever-growing perception of His 
perfect goodness. This full sympathy must imply 
further, whenever a Divine call is given, a willing and 
active co-operation. Where this offends us, the alterna- 
tive is plain, that we charge God himself with cruelty 
or folly, or else that we are aliens in heart from that 
perfect Goodness which we profess to venerate 'and adore. 

Now if once we admit the justice of the sentence on 



THE CANAANITES. 37 

the Canaanites, there is a weighty reason why its execu- 
tion should be committed to the chosen people of God. 
By this means alone could the solemn lesson of God's 
hatred of moral evil, and of its awful consequences, be 
. most effectually proclaimed. No method could be de- 
vised more likely to deter the Israelites from those sins, 
against which they were themselves commanded to 
execute the just vengeance of God, or to alarm and 
arouse the consciences of the heathen, so far as the 
tidings of this solemn visitation might extend. 

Two objections, however, may still be urged; that the 
judgment, with reference to the Canaanites themselves, 
was too severe ; and that its natural effect on the Israelites 
must have been to stir up every fierce, cruel, and selfish 
passion. But the facts, when examined, are a full answer. 

And first, the Divine forbearance to these Canaanites 
had now lasted four hundred years, or more than ten 
generations. Even before the birth of Isaac the truth 
was proclaimed, that no judgment could be executed 
on the guilty race till forbearance had run its full course : 
"In the fourth generation they shall return hither again ; 
for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (Gen. 
xv. 16). And when the predicted time was arrived, and 
Israel had been rescued from Egypt with mighty 
wonders, in order to enter on the land of promise, the same 
act of righteousness which condemned them, for their 
unbelief, to sojourn in the wilderness forty years, was 
one of grace and forbearance to these Canaanites. A 
fresh space was given them for amendment and repent- 
ance, even when their pollutions and cruelties had reached 



38 THE CANAANITES. 

a revolting stage (Lev. xviii. 22—28. Deut. xii. 31). 
They could not conceive themselves to be exposed merely 
to the lawless passions of a cruel and hostile race. The 
report of the wonders in Egypt had soon reached them, 
and produced deep consternation, though not a true 
repentance (Josh. ii. 10, 11). And when, in one single 
instance, there was submission to the hand of God, and 
fear of His judgments, leading to an eager effort to avert 
them, that effort was crowned with success. The pro- 
mise to the Gibeonites, though procured by deceit, was 
still to be kept inviolably ; and its violation by Saul, 
even four hundred years later, brought on Israel a heavy 
judgment (2 Sam. xxi. 1 — 4). 

Again, the whole history shows how carefully the 
children of Israel were shut up on every side from the 
indulgence of wicked passions and mere self-will, and 
taught to view themselves as the instruments of a Divine 
judgment alone. Their own convenience, or gain, or 
national antipathy, was allowed no weight in guiding 
their conduct. When the Edomites refused them a 
passage, they were to make a long circuit, rather than 
use any force to their own brethren. The charge was 
given them still later, ' ' I will not give you of their land, 
no, not a foot breadth. Ye shall buy meat of them 
for money, that ye may eat ; and water for money, that 
ye may drink." The same charge was repeated towards 
Moab and Ammon, whom there was still greater reason 
to regard as bitter enemies : " Distress not the Moabites.-" 
" Distress not the children of Ammon, nor meddle with 
them." And even on the first excitement of conquest 



THE CANAANITES. 39 

over Og and Sihon, they were to observe rigidly this 
Divine prohibition : " Only unto the land of the children 
of Ammon thou earnest not, nor unto the cities in the 
mountains, nor unto whatsoever the Lord our God 
forbad us."" The entire destruction of the spoil was a 
further provision of the same kind; and placed this 
solemn execution of God's judgment on iniquity in 
open contrast to all the selfish instincts of a merely 
human warfare. 

There is a still deeper line of thought which might 
be pursued in vindication of the wisdom of these 
messages to Israel, however severe. A refusal to own 
the exceeding sinfulness of sin, its fatal obstinacy, and 
just demerit, is the most dangerous obstacle to all 
moral progress, and to that work of redemption, whereby 
alone the instincts of a true benevolence can be ful- 
filled. The salvation of a lost and fallen world rests 
on one foundation, the death and resurrection of the 
Son of God. And what is the revealed ground of this 
exaltation of our Lord, the one source of every blessing 
the sinner can hope to enjoy? The Psalmist and the 
Apostle give here their consenting testimony : " Thou 
hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity ; wherefore 
God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of 
gladness above thy fellows. - " "I delight to do thy 
will, O my God; yea, thy law is within my heart." 
One main part of that law, hid in the Saviour's heart, 
which strengthened Him for victory over all the powers 
of evil, consisted of these severe denunciations of God's 
anger against stubborn and malicious wickedness. Our 



40 THE CANAANITES. 

only true security against moral evil is not indifference, 
but deep abhorrence. Until we have learned how evil it 
is in its own nature, we shall never be earnest in seeking 
deliverance from its power, nor attain that moral firm- 
ness which transforms a weak, sickly, puerile benevolence 
into the mighty and victorious energy of redeeming love. 

I remain, yours faithfully, 

T. R. Bieks. 



LETTEE V. 



ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 



My dear Sir, 

III. I have now to answer your questions with 
regard to the most solemn of all the truths revealed in 
the word of God, the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. 

" Nothing/' you remark, and I agree with the state- 
ment, " can be more positively laid down by our Lord, 
than that the reward of heaven and the punishment 
of hell are eternal, and strange warnings of judgment 
to come pervade almost every page/'' On the other 
hand, a perfect love seems to imply a sincere desire for 
the happiness of every conscious and intelligent creature, 
and a perfect victory of Almighty love that this desire 
should not fail through the strength of evil, but be 
at length fulfilled. Here, then, we seem involved in 
a hopeless contradiction between direct and repeated 
statements of Scripture on the one side, and inferences, 
on the other, natural and almost inevitable, from one 
of the most fundamental truths of revealed religion. 
The subject is deeply solemn in its own nature, and 



42 ON EUTTJEE PUNISHMENT. 

has caused more perplexity than any other, in every 
age of the Church, to thoughtful Christians. My own 
mind has been more than usually exercised upon it 
many years ago. I cannot hope to give your perplexity 
full and entire relief. Yet some light has arisen to 
me out of the darkness and sorrow of years of early 
meditation ; and though I have shrunk so long, for 
a special reason, from publishing my thoughts, yours 
is precisely such a case as seems to make it my duty 
to explain the conclusion to which I have long ago 
been led, and the direction in which my spirit has 
found relief, without daring, by unauthorized guess- 
work, to tamper with the entire truthfulness of the 
solemn messages of God. 

1. First of all, every created being may be viewed 
in two different aspects, internal and external; what 
it is in itself, and also as part of a greater whole. It 
has a personal and individual, but also a relative or 
federal character. This double warp and woof runs 
through the whole of Scripture, and occasions a fre- 
quent antithesis in its statements of Divine truth. Thus 
we are told that "in Adam all die," and still "the 
soul that sinneth, it shall die;" that "in Christ shall all 
be made alive," and also that eternal life shall be 
the result of personal work, "patient continuance in 
well doing " (Rom. ii. 7) . The charge to the Galatians, 
"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law 
of Christ," is followed at once by the contrasted caution, 
" For every man shall bear his own burden." Again, 
the Apostle teaches the Corinthians in the same verse, 



ON FUTUEE PUNISHMENT. 43 

" He that planteth and lie that watereth are one : 
yet every man shall receive his reward according* to 
his own labour/'' Other passages, in which a similar 
contrast appears, will suggest themselves on a careful 
perusal and study of the word of God. 

2. Secondly, wherever selfishness is not complete, 
the same contrast is found in the elements which 
constitute human joy and sorrow, happiness and misery. 
In part, they are personal and subjective; while in 
part they arise from sympathy with the happiness of 
those whom we love, or from the contemplation of 
objective truth. How often has the wounded soldier 
or sailor almost forgotten his wounds in his deep joy 
for his commander's or his country's victory ! The 
cases are frequent in which the sense of severe suffering 
is almost lost in some absorbing object of thought, 
or joyful tidings of the happiness of others who are 
deeply beloved. The Christian, whatever his personal 
peace and comfort, is often recalled to deep sorrow 
by the thought of abounding sin, of a dishonoured 
Saviour, and of perishing souls ; and hours of bereave- 
ment have their anguish lightened by stedfast faith 
in the increased happiness of the friends whom death 
has removed. So that all happiness is of two kinds, 
personal or federal, one resulting directly from blessings 
strictly our own, and the other from sympathy with 
the joys of others, or from the contemplation of external 
and objective truth. 

3. Thirdly, all the statements of Scripture with 
respect to eternal judgment and the opposite issues 



44 ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 

of blessing and punishment, refer to the personal and 
individual characters of men, — " Every man shall bear 
his own burden/'' "Every one shall receive his reward 
according to his own labour/'' " My reward is with me, 
to render to every man as his work shall be." " He 
called his servants, that he might know how much 
each man had gained by trading/'' " We must all appear 
before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may 
receive the things done in his body, according to that 
he hath done, whether it be good or bad." The personal 
conduct is not only the ground of a personal sentence, 
but of unequal degrees of punishment and bliss, — "It 
shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in 
the day of judgment than for you." "The servant 
which knew his Lord's will, and prepared not himself, 
shall be beaten with many stripes." " Of how much 
sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy, who . . . 
hath done despite to the Spirit of grace ! " " He that 
soweth sparingly shall reap sparingly, and he that 
soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully." " One 
star differeth from another star in glory." The result 
of this personal judgment, by the constant and repeated 
testimony of the Scriptures, is a final contrast, an 
eternal separation, depending on the use or abuse of 
the probation in this mortal life. Their earnest appeals 
to men to repent and turn to God derive their energy 
from this all-pervading truth, often expressed, and 
every where implied, in their large variety of warnings, 
threatenings, promises, and urgent and affectionate ex- 
hortations. 



ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 45 

4. Let us now suppose that these statements of 
Scripture on the eternal contrast between the righteous 
and the wicked, the saved and the lost, however true, 
and however solemn, are not the whole truth, but 
that there is a further objective or federal element, 
common alike to both, which is nowhere in the Bible, 
in set terms, explicitly revealed. Let us suppose that 
the future condition of the lost will combine, with the 
utmost personal humiliation, shame, and anguish, the 
passive contemplation of a ransomed universe, and of 
all the innumerable varieties of blessedness enjoyed 
by unfallen spirits, and the ransomed people of God ; 
such a contemplation as would be fitted, in its own 
nature, to raise the soul into a trance of holy adoration 
in the presence of infinite and unsearchable Goodness. 
If this were true, still there are weighty reasons why 
this aspect of God's purpose should not be early re- 
vealed. That love, which is the source of all the Divine 
messages, may be the reason why the All- wise refuses 
to unveil a part of truth, which, even in clearing His 
character from the blasphemies by which it is now 
assailed, might, through the perverseness of sinful 
hearts, deaden the conscience, paralyze the will, and 
obscure the momentous contrast between the results 
of present obedience and disobedience, so as to defeat 
one main object of all Divine revelation. 

Assuming, then, the truth of the suggestion I have 
made, there is a weighty and sufficient cause why the 
Scriptures should have passed by this secret purpose 
of God in total silence, and leave it to be deduced by 



46 ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 

patient thought and moral inference alone. The solemn 
contrast of reward and punishment can thus work its 
full effect,, unmingled and unmitigated, upon the hearts 
of men. 

The sternness of the Divine threatenings, and the 
refusal to weaken their terrors by revealing distinctly 
the contrasted truth, may, on this view, be seen here- 
after to be the most wonderful illustration of God's 
perfect love. In the affairs of life it implies great 
nobility of character, to rest willingly for years under 
reproach and obloquy wholly undeserved, when these 
censures and calumnies would have been scattered in 
a moment to the winds by the publication of a secret, 
which some point of honour, some sense of public duty, 
or some promise, forbids the party so unjustly censured 
to reveal. This high excellence, rarely and dimly seen 
even in good and upright men, will perhaps hereafter 
be seen to belong in its full perfection to the Only Good. 
The willingness of the Most High to remain exposed for 
ages to all the blasphemies hurled against Him because 
of these solemn threatenings, may then be found to add 
a crowning excellence and beauty to the perfect mani- 
festation of His redeeming love. 

5. The silence of Scripture, then, or the want of 
direct and explicit statements of the view now suggested, 
is no disproof of its reality and truth. It is only a 
weighty reason why those who have found in it relief 
for their own perplexity should beware of a rash and 
hasty publication of their thoughts, lest they should 
run counter to the wisdom and love by which alone 



ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 47 

that silence can be fully explained. Let us now 
inquire whether direct evidence cannot be found to 
confirm its truth, not on the surface of Scripture, or 
in distinct and specific statements, but drawn by simple 
inference from the main truths of the Bible, and confirmed 
by its agreement with all the secondary allusions, de- 
scriptions, warnings, and promises of the word of God. 

And first, there is one frequent and serious error in 
popular views of future punishment, which, in the words 
of the Article, has no warranty of Scripture, but is plainly 
repugnant to the word of God. It is not uncommon 
to speak of lost souls as their own mutual tormentors, 
and given up to Satan to be tormented by him for ever. 
But this reverses the actual revelation. The judgment 
is not the time of Satan's power, but of his overthrow 
and punishment. Lost souls are never represented as at 
liberty to torment each other, but each as enduring, in 
passive subjection, a solemn sentence from the hand 
of God. To assume the perpetual continuance of active 
malice and permitted blasphemies, is to ascribe to God a 
dominion shared for ever with the powers of evil. It 
makes hell the scene of Satan's triumphant malice, just 
as heaven is that of the Creator's triumphant love. Yet 
the descriptions of that final doom imply the utter 
prostration and entire repression of all actings of the 
rebellious will under the immediate display of Infinite 
Holiness. Satan, in the last judgment, is no tormentor 
of lost souls, but only the foremost criminal, doomed 
to the deepest fall and heaviest punishment. 

Now if the doom of lost souls involves an unwilling 



48 ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 

acknowledgment of God^s justice in their own sentence, 
must it not also imply a compulsory but real perception 
of all the other attributes of the Almighty? Must 
not the contemplation of infinite wisdom and love, how- 
ever solemn the punishment and the compulsion by 
which alone it is made possible for those who have 
despised their day of grace, be still, in its own nature, 
unutterably blessed ? The personal loss and ruin may 
be complete and irreparable, the anguish intense, the 
shame and sorrow dreadful, the humiliation infinite and 
irreversible. Yet out of its depth there may arise such 
a passive but real view of the joys of a ransomed uni- 
verse, and of the unveiled perfections of the Godhead, as 
to fulfil, even here, in a strange, mysterious way, the 
predicted office of the Redeemer of souls, and to swallow 
up death in victory. 

Such is the general nature of the conclusion in which 
my own thoughts have found repose, by which alone, I 
believe, the perfect truth of the solemn threatenings 
of our Lord and his Apostles can be seen to harmonize 
with the perfect and unchanging love of the Creator 
to all the creatures of his hand ; while various hints of 
inspired Scripture receive their most expressive inter- 
pretation, and deep analogies, which lie below the surface, 
and only calm and patient and reverent thought can 
trace out and discern, are satisfied and fulfilled. But 
I reverence the silence of the word of God. And while 
these reflections may clear away, as they have cleared 
to my own spirit, some of the dark clouds which rest on 
the hope of the life to come, I count it true wisdom for 



ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 49 

the Church and all its members to dwell most constantly 
on those aspects of God's purpose which are most 
explicitly and clearly revealed. We need to beware 
lest, in seeking to pierce the veil which shrouds the 
Divine glory, we should perish in breaking through to 
gaze, and lose the awakening power of those solemn 
messages which have come to us directly and plainly 
from the lips of the All-merciful and All- wise. I shall 
rejoice if the thoughts I have now offered, and the 
key-note they supply, are any relief to your perplexity, 
and help you to perceive how, in God's time, the dark- 
ness may be wholly rolled away. But I would counsel 
you affectionately to practise the same caution I have 
felt binding on my own conscience, and to suffer no 
reasonings, inferences, or conjectures on the deep things 
of God to weaken the power of that solemn contrast 
between the broad way and the narrow, eternal life 
and eternal death, which the Son of God himself has 
explicitly and solemnly revealed. 

I remain, yours faithfully, 

T. R. Bieks. 



LETTER VI. 

the state of the departed. 

My dear Sir, 

IV. Another subject on which your mind has 
been perplexed, is the occurrence of doubts about futurity, 
even in the minds of good and pious men. You quote 
from Mr. Robertson's sermons admissions of this kind, 
and ask whether this terrible ordeal of doubt is to be 
viewed as a trial through which every Christian has to 
pass. 

A partial answer to this inquiry may be found in the 
broad statements of Scripture with regard to the nature 
of the souFs redemption. The state out of which every 
Christian has to be raised and rescued by Divine grace is 
one of spiritual blindness and almost total unbelief. A 
faint glimmer of eternal truth may remain, not wholly 
erased from the tables of the heart ; but the Spirit of God 
uses the strong phrases, deaf, blind, gross, dead in sin, 
to describe the first condition of the soul, from which it 
has to be raised by the Gospel into newness of life. 
There are some cases, like that of St. Paul, where the 



THE STATE OE THE DEPARTED. 51 

work of years seems to be compressed into a few days, 
and the soul, lately dead in sin, rises suddenly into a 
maturity of faith and spiritual understanding. In these 
cases the anguish of the first awakening may be very 
l deep, but the later experience, comparatively, an un- 
clouded sunshine of hope and joy. But in most cases the 
first transition is from practical neglect of eternal things 
to a weak and infant faith ; which grows only through a 
gradual discipline, and successive stages of experience, 
mixed with temptation, to the full assurance of a ripened 
understanding, and a manly stature in Christ. In such 
cases there may be a frequent recurrence of doubts and 
questionings, even affecting the foundations of religious 
faith. 

The testimony of Baxter on this point, in his auto- 
biography, is very instructive and remarkable. He speaks 
as follows : — 

" Whereas, in my younger days, I never was tempted 
to doubt the truth of Scripture or of Christianity, but all 
my doubts and fears were exercised at home, about my 
own sincerity, and this was what I called unbelief; since 
then, my sorest assaults have been on the other side ; and 
such they were, that had I been void of internal experi- 
ence, the adhesion of love, and the special help of God, 
and had not discerned more reason for my religion than 
I did when younger, I had certainly apostatized to infi- 
delity, though for atheism or ungodliness my reason seeth 
no stronger arguments than may be brought to prove 
that there is no earth, or air, or sun. I am now, there- 
fore, much more apprehensive than before of the necessity 
e 2 



52 THE STATE OF THE DEPARTED. 

of well grounding men in their religion, and especially of 
the witness of the indwelling Spirit, for I more sensibly 
perceive that the Spirit is the great witness of Christ and 
Christianity to the world. And though the folly of 
fanatics tempted me long to overlook the strength of the # 
testimony of the Spirit, while they placed it in a certain 
internal assertion or enthusiastic inspiration, I now see 
that the Holy Ghost, in another manner, is the witness 
of Christ and His agent in the world. . . . There is many 
a one that hideth his temptations to infidelity, because he 
thinketh it a shame to open them, and because it may 
generate doubts in others. But I fear the imperfection 
of most men's care of their salvation, and of their dili- 
gence and resolution in a holy life, doth come from the 
imperfection of their belief in Christianity and the life to 
come. No petition seemeth to me more necessary than 
this, ' Lord, increase our faith; ' ' Lord, I believe, help 
thou my unbelief ! ' " 

These words of one of the most cautious and profound 
of English divines are a direct answer to your inquiry. 
They show that temptations of this kind are very common, 
even among advanced Christians, though perhaps not 
strictly universal. But the Baptist's message does not 
warrant the superstructure the author you quote builds 
upon it, as if it implied an almost total failure of faith, 
in his last hours, of that " greatest among the woman- 
born." It implied much perplexity of heart, but a per- 
plexity quite consistent with strong and real faith, else 
why send to our Lord for an explanation of the conduct 
he could not understand ? The course of the Saviour 



THE STATE OF THE DEPARTED. 53 

was widely different from what the stern Reformer of 
Israel had expected in that great Successor, whose fan 
was to be in His hand, to purge His floor, and who was 
to burn up the chaff with the fire of judgment. Now, on 
the contrary, He left his own forerunner neglected in the 
prison, and suffered the ungodly to oppress the righteous 
without let or hindrance. There was human infirmity, 
like that of Peter, when he cried, " Be it far from thee, 
Lord, this shall not be unto thee."" But this infirmity, in 
either case, was quite consistent with the reality, and even 
the vigorous activity, of a genuine faith. 

My own comparative freedom from the temptations to 
which Baxter alludes, I ascribe, under the Divine bless- 
ing, to an early habit of the inductive study of the word 
of God. I think it the only wise and safe course for the 
Christian inquirer, instead of seeking to determine the 
nature and properties of the soul by abstract reasoning, 
and to soar into regions where the air is almost too thin 
to sustain life, by abstract discussions on immortality, to 
remember that the great revealed hope of the Gospel is 
not death, but resurrection ; and to dwell on that historical 
plan of redemption, from Genesis onward, which centres 
in the death and resurrection of Christ, and in His future 
return, and the resurrection of His people. These two 
great waymarks, in the past and the future, are both of 
them linked inseparably with a vast number of kindred 
truths. In this way the Christian, who studies the Bible 
with humility and perseverance, may attain an assurance 
of " the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world 
to come," almost as deep and firm as the consciousness 



54 THE STATE OF THE DEPARTED. 

of his own existence, and not weaker than that which 
men of education usually feel with reference to the 
Newtonian theory, the law of gravitation, and the struc- 
ture of the solar system, the surest parts of natural 
science. It is easy to perplex ourselves in abstract dis- 
cussions on the soul's immortality. But death is a fact 
so strange and solemn, and in a certain sense so irrational, 
as in hours of temptation to obscure and confound all the 
conclusions we can draw by the strength of reason alone. 
Our conceptions, also, of a disembodied spirit are so dim, 
so mixed and entangled with bodily associations, that 
they will be apt to fail us when most we require their aid. 
And this may be one reason why the Scriptures practise 
here a marked reserve ; and all their discoveries of the 
future centre in their testimony, that the Lord will return, 
and that in our flesh we shall see God, when also " this cor- 
ruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal put on 
immortality " 

V. The Intermediate State is one of the last subjects on 
which you inquire. Is there, you ask, such a state between 
death and the judgment ? Is it one of perfect conscious- 
ness ? Will the righteous, at once, be perfectly happy, 
and the unrighteous entirely wretched ? Does the idea 
of a sleep of the soul involve a denial of the resurrection, 
and do departed saints at once recognize and hold inter- 
course with each other ? 

Now first, that there is an intermediate state, to those 
who believe in the resurrection of the dead, will admit no 
doubt whatever. Unless there were no future existence, 
or else the resurrection were a change too insignificant to 



THE STATE OF THE DEPARTED. 55 

deserve notice, such a state, whatever its precise charac- 
ter, there must clearly be. The real doubt must refer to 
these two questions, how far it differs from total uncon- 
sciousness on one side, and wherein, on the other, it 
differs from and falls short of the life of the promised 
resurrection. 

On this subject small reliance, I think, ought to be 
placed on abstract reasonings concerning the faculties of 
the soul. It is equally unsafe to rely on popular im- 
pressions, which Christians take up loosely from one 
another, or from the prevalent religious literature, without 
ever applying by direct and careful search to the word of 
God, the sole fountain of inspired and certain truth. 
Through ambiguous and imperfect translations of the 
Hebrew Sheol, and the Greek Hades and Gehenna, con- 
spiring with the love of a false simplicity, views of 
the state of the dead, not warranted by any clear or dis- 
tinct Scripture evidence, nay, rather opposed to it, have 
prevailed widely, and still prevail, among many pious 
Christians. No impressions are more frequent and usual, 
in religious circles, and even beyond them, than that good 
men, when they die, go at once to heaven, or pass into 
glory. These statements occur perpetually in hymns and 
religious works, as if they were the plainest and most 
fundamental part of the Gospel. And yet, when we turn 
to Scripture, not one solitary text to justify either im- 
pression can be found. Neither in the Old Testament 
nor in the New can one instance be found, where the soul 
of the righteous, in dying, is said to rise to heaven, or 
enter at once into glory. The state of the departed is 



56 THE STATE OF THE DEPARTED. 

represented as one of undress,, of nakedness, of being un- 
clothed, of waiting and expectation, though one of rest 
and peace to those that die in the Lord. The popular 
view, represented by the " Assembly's Catechism/'' seems 
to have grown directly out of the mingled impatience and 
unholiness of Christians in the latter days, and their wide- 
spread neglect of the great hope of the Church, the return 
of the Lord in glory. Tried by the images the Spirit of 
God employs, it is as unnatural as to dream of subjects 
being presented in their night-clothes at the levee and in 
the palace of an earthly sovereign. Three ideas are asso- 
ciated in the word of God with its brief descriptions of 
the departed righteous — humiliation, peaceful rest, and 
earnest expectation. One of these results from the nature 
of death in itself; one from the earnest of redemption 
already bestowed ; and one from the hope of the full and 
perfect redemption still to come. 

With regard to the consciousness or unconsciousness of 
departed spirits, it seems likely that Christians have gene- 
ralized too much, and in opposite ways. It is clearly 
conceivable that, either in the sovereignty of God, or 
from the state in which the spirit leaves the body, the 
consciousness after death may sometimes be so dim, as to 
seem on -the point of ceasing entirely : sometimes so full, 
and bright, and clear, as to seem almost like the glory of 
the resurrection begun. It will be hard to reconcile and 
explain all the statements of Scripture, if we assume that 
every statement must apply, in common, to every de- 
parted believer. David pleads for life in the words, " In 
death there is no remembrance of Thee ; in the grave who 



THE STATE OF THE DEPARTED. 57 

shall give Thee thanks ? " while St. Paul has " a desire 
to depart, and be with Christ, which is far better."" Yet 
the same Apostle speaks of the death of some Corinthian 
believers as a loss rather than a gain : " For this cause 
some are weak and sickly among you, and some sleep. 
For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged 
of the Lord. But when we are judged, we are chastened 
of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the 
world/' The resurrection of Lazarus and of Tabitha 
could scarcely be set before us as an act of Divine grace 
and favour, as well as power, if it brought them back from 
a far higher to a lower consciousness and measure of bliss. 
It seems the course which agrees best with deep reve- 
rence for the word of God, to let every passage retain its 
own features, and produce its own impression. "Why may 
we not believe that separated spirits, according to their 
previous state, or the sovereign pleasure of God, may, 
some of them, be in a state so exclusive of all activity, 
as to be equivalent to "perishing" (1 Cor. xv. 18), if no 
awakening were to follow; and others in such joyous con- 
sciousness of the love* of Christ, as to be far better than 
their ripest experience, while dwelling in the mortal 
body ; so that the Paradise of the departed, in their case, 
may have a near approach to the higher privileges and 
fuller joy of the New Jerusalem ? 

I remain, yours faithfully, 

T. R. Birks. 



LETTER VII. 



MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 



My dear Sir, 

VI. The mutual recognition of departed friends is 
the last subject on which you feel uncertainty, and ask for 
my judgment. This can scarcely be ranked under the 
head of Scripture difficulties. But since the topic is one 
of deep interest, and closely connected with great doc- 
trines of the faith, I will freely offer a few remarks. 

Now, first, with regard to the mutual recognition of 
redeemed saints after the resurrection, I do not see how 
a moment's hesitation can arise. It«is either expressed or 
implied in all the descriptions of future blessedness : "What 
is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing ? Are not even 
ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his 
coming V " Then shall we know even as we are known." 
It seems plain that the knowledge Christians will then 
have of each other, of their whole character and history, 
will be far greater than in this present life. For now 
we live in a comparative solitude ; and those who know 
each other best are still, to a great' extent, mutual 



MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 59 

strangers. If the disciples recognized Moses and Elijah, 
whom they had never seen, in the holy mount, how much 
more will those who are already known recognize each 
other in the kingdom of God ! 

In the intermediate state, before the resurrection, the 
case is widely different. Here there seems to me to be 
no evidence of such a recognition, and I incline strongly 
to an opposite view. The coming of Christ is described 
with plain emphasis as the time of " our gathering 
together unto Him.'''' In that day, and not before, the 
Apostle expected his converts to be his joy and crown of 
rejoicing. The phrases by which their state is described 
— they that sleep, those that sleep in Jesus — though 
they by no means imply unconsciousness, are wholly 
adverse to the idea of direct intercommunion. Those who 
sleep together, even in the same chamber, however vivid 
their dreams in the night may be, have no communion 
with each other till their waking hour. The statement 
that all must give account of " the things done in the 
body/'' seems to imply that there are no actions out of the 
body, involving active choice and responsibility; which 
would not be true, if voluntary intercourse with each 
other were the law of their being. In that case, why 
should not Adam or Abel be made responsible for the 
five thousand years of accountable activity, since the 
time when their death occurred ? The description of the 
patriarchs, that they were " gathered to their fathers/'' 
might seem, perhaps, to point to an opposite view. But 
the idea really conveyed, on a comparison of the passages, 
is only that of a separate resting-place, a sleeping- 



60 MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 

chamber, in Sheol, or the grave, into which the souls of 
the righteous alone enter. So the prophet speaks of 
them : " He shall enter into peace, they shall rest in their 
beds, each one walking in his uprightness." 

Where the direct statements of Scripture are few and 
obscure, Christians will be apt to be guided rather by 
their own wishes than by the indirect evidence and con- 
structive testimony of the word of God. When death 
is viewed, not as God's just sentence on a defiled nature, 
which must be broken down to be built anew, but only 
as a compulsory separation from beloved friends, there 
will be a strong bias on the mind to think the separation 
as short as possible. But God's ways are not as our 
ways. The discipline whereby He makes his children 
partakers of his holiness, often departs widely from their 
own ideas of what is most pleasant and desirable. My 
own instinctive feelings, I confess, are wholly opposite to 
those, from which many pious persons seem to derive 
their chief satisfaction, when they think of their departed 
friends. Must not the renewed intercourse of the de- 
parted with each other be a distraction and humiliation, 
rather than a joy and pleasure, while the work of redemp- 
tion is still incomplete ? Would Lazarus begin con- 
versing with his sisters while the grave-clothes were still 
around him ? The Scriptures plainly yield us no direct 
warrant for the classical or poetical fancy of " dialogues 
of the dead." " To sleep " is the negative, and " to 
depart and be with Christ," the positive aspect, of the 
state of the disembodied spirits of believers. And until 
that day, when this corruptible shall put on incor- 



MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 61 

ruption, perhaps nothing may be so beneficial to the 
spirits of the just, so favourable to the high purpose 
which has marked all their life discipline, as their abiding 
in one unbroken trance of communion with the Lord 
himself. It may be well for them to remain undisturbed 
by lower fellowship, till their spiritual faculties, often so 
unripe when they leave the body, are strengthened and 
made ripe to endure the brightness of the judgment day 
and of the kingdom of God. All that is properly re- 
ward, as distinct from the inseparable results of a pure 
conscience and a regenerate heart, seems reserved by 
the Divine wisdom, that it may be received together by 
all His people. Thus patience has its perfect work, and 
their joy at last is a pure and unselfish joy. 

It may be urged, perhaps, that in our Lord's parable 
a conversation is described between the rich man and 
Abraham. But it must be remembered that Abraham, 
the father of the faithful, into whose bosom Lazarus is 
borne, does not answer here to any common believer, but 
occupies the same place as our Lord himself in the New 
Testament. Between Lazarus and the angels, or Lazarus 
and the rich man, so far as the parable is a guide, there 
is absolute silence. The analogy is best maintained, if 
we suppose that, under the New Testament, departed 
spirits have communion with the Lord, in whose bosom 
the faithful rest, but with the Lord alone. 

But the importance of the inquiry depends much on 
the question, how far we are warranted to delay the 
resurrection in our thoughts to a distant time ? If we 
do, there must be a strong temptation to fill up the blank 



6£ MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 

of Scripture teaching with fancies of our own. This 
the Church of Rome and modern Protestant divines 
seem to have done in opposite ways. Is it not rather 
the voice of the Spirit, that the resurrection ought to 
seem to us so real and so near, and eternity so vast, as to 
make details on the mode of the spirit^ separate 
existence of small moment, compared with direct revela- 
tions of the resurrection, and the life of the world to 
come ? Must there not be wise and weighty reasons 
why the Spirit of God says so little on one subject, 
and so much on the other ? Our wisdom, surely, is to 
tread closely in the footprints of His divine revelations. 
When we dwell on the separate state, a sense of dimness 
and uncertainty creeps over our mind, unless we clothe it 
with all the features of our present condition, and thus 
assume, virtually, that the resurrection is past already to 
the main part of the Church of Christ. But direct medita- 
tion on the resurrection itself, and the glory and happi- 
ness of the risen saints, must give precision, reality, and 
power, to our hope of the good things to come. It will 
enable us, through full confidence in the Saviour's love 
and the Divine goodness, to look forward without fear, 
sometimes even with desire, to that interval of separation 
from the body, through which every generation of be- 
lievers but the last must pass on their road to the New 
Jerusalem of God. 

You allude, in the close of your letter, to a hope you 
sometimes cherish that ultimately all created beings will 
be pardoned, though to act on that hope in this world 
would be most dangerous. Some former remarks will 



MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 63 

show you my own impressions with regard to this sur- 
mise. But it may be well to add a few further observa- 
tions. 

Now if you mean by pardon, what I fear some persons 
mean by it, the cessation of vindictive malice on the part 
of God towards particular sinners, then such pardon is 
never given to any, because such malice has no existence, 
save in the chimeras of a conscience defiled and perverted 
by sin. Or if it means an act of grace, which shall 
admit the unholy, in their unholiness, to the vision of 
God, such pardon is an essential and inherent impossi- 
bility. Again, if we mean by it a miraculous act, after 
this life, whereby an exercise of Divine sovereignty effects 
the change in a moment in lost souls, which the Gospel 
and the Spirit have failed to effect here, without any 
further "sacrifice for sins" (Heb. x.), it is doubtful 
whether such a work is possible in its own nature, and 
the statements of Scripture give us the strongest reasons 
to disbelieve its future occurrence. Still further, if by 
this pardon be meant some act of mercy, which will blot 
out the deep contrast between the saved and the lost, and 
wholly undo and reverse the sentence solemnly denounced 
on the present rejectors of the grace of Christ; then the 
admission of such a hope would go far towards making 
God a liar in his most emphatic warnings to the sinner, 
and would destroy the consistency and moral truthfulness 
of a large part of the word of God. 

On the other hand, if it be meant that the infliction 
of just punishment is not the whole of God's purpose 
towards the unsaved; but that, while His holiness is for 



64 MUTUAL RECOGNITION. 

ever manifested in the fulfilment of His warnings, and 
in their own irreparable loss and shame, there will, even in 
the depth of that ruin, be such a display of the unchange- 
able love of the Holy Creator to all the creatures of His 
hand, such depths of compassion to the self-ruined, as, 
without reversing their doom, may send a thrill of won- 
drous consolation through the abyss of what would 
else be unmingled woe and despair,— I do believe, for- 
many reasons, that such a display of God's all-perfect 
love is truly kept in store for the ages to come. While 
clear and explicit revelations of it have been strictly for- 
borne for wise reasons, its truth may be deduced by 
humble and reverent hearts from a patient study of the 
Scripture, and from calm meditation on the sure victory of 
good over evil, and the mingling of mercy with judgment 
in the perfections of the Most High. 

I have now replied briefly to most of the questions you 
have proposed. From the tenour of your notes, I trust 
that, with the blessing of God, you have gained some 
help and comfort from the thoughts which, in my own 
mind, have been the slow product of years of meditation. 
In closing these letters, I would commend you respect- 
fully and affectionately to the teaching of that Blessed 
Comforter, whose appointed work it is to guide the people 
of Christ into all truth. With deep interest in your 
spiritual welfare, I remain, 

Your friend and servant in Christ, 

T. R. Birks. 



NOTES 



COLERIDGE'S " CONFESSIONS OF AN 
INQUIRING SPIRIT." 

Pp. 1, 38. " Seven Letters to a Friend, concerning the 
bounds between the right and the superstitious use and 
estimation of the sacred Canon, in which the writer sub- 
missively discloses his own private judgment on the 
following questions : — 

" i. is it necessary or expedient to insist on the 
Divine Origin and Authority of all and every part 
op the Canonical Books, as the condition, or pirst 
principle, op Christian Faith ? " 

Certainly not. This could not have been the case with 
the jailor at Philippi on the instant of his conversion, nor 
with the Church before the Canon was settled, nor, by 
parity of reasoning, since then. Yet still an implicit faith 
in this truth, derived from education alone, may be a 
great help towards explicit faith, when Christian expe- 
rience has deepened, and spiritual knowledge been en- 
larged. 



Ob NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

" II. Or may not the due appreciation of the Scrip- 
tures collectively be more safely relied on as the result and 
consequence of belief in Christ, and the gradual increase, 
in respect of particular passages, of our spiritual discern- 
ment of their truth and authority ; supplying a test and 
measure of our own growth and progress as individual 
believers, without the servile fear that prevents or over- 
clouds the free honour which cometh from love?" 
1 John iv. 18. 

But see p. 84 (108). If every step of your own pro- 
gress has brought you nearer to a full conviction of the 
Divine wisdom of that Word in every part, why should 
you doubt what is the real asymptote to which the curve 
of your own varying judgment continually draws nearer 
and nearer, as you advance towards the full maturity of 
spiritual wisdom ? 

Let. I. p. 4 (40). " Even with regard to Christianity 
itself, like certain plants, I creep towards the light, even 
though it draw me away from the more nourishing 
warmth. Yea, I should do so, even if the light had 
made its way through a rent in the wall of the temple." 

Surely the true light is ever joined with warmth, no 
less than the true warmth with light, for both proceed 
from Him who is the Sun of Righteousness. It is well, 
in religion, to avoid the charcoal fumes of mere animal 
warmth and excitement, but is it therefore more safe to 
follow a light without heat ? To chase an ignis fatuus 
will lead us into danger, as really as the suffocating heat 
of a stove might bring on delirium and death. It 
is the sunlight of Divine truth which alone it is safe 



colebidge's confessions. 67 

to follow, and this ever warms, while it enlightens the 
soul. 

Pp. 8— 10 (43—45). "I take up this work (the Bible), 
with the purpose to read it for the first time, as I should 
read any other book, as far, at least, as I can or dare. 
For I neither can, nor dare, throw off a strong and awful 
prepossession in its favour ; certain as I am that a large 
part of the light and life, in and by which I see, love, 
and embrace the truth, organized into a living body of 
faith and knowledge, has been directly or indirectly 
derived to me from this sacred volume, and unable to 
determine what I do not owe to its influence. But even 
on this account, because it has these inalienable claims on 
my reverence and gratitude, I will not leave it in the 
power of unbelievers to say that the Bible is for me only 
what the Koran is to the deaf Turk, and the Vedas for 
the feeble and acquiescent Hindoo. No, I will retire up 
into the mountain, and hold secret commune with my 
Bible above the contagious blastments of prejudice, and 
the fog-blight of selfish superstition. . . . There is a 
Light higher than all, the Word that was in the begin- 
ning, the Light, of which light itself is but the Shechinah 
and outward tabernacle, the Word that is light for every 
man, and life for as many as give heed to it. If between 
the Word and the written letter I still any where seem 
to myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that 
such there actually is ; nor, on the other hand, will I fall 
under the condemnation of those that would lie for God, 
but seek as I may, be thankful for what I have, and 
wait." 

f 2 



68 NOTES ON INSPIRATION". 

There is nothing more miserable than the kind of faith 
some have in the Bible, which practically amounts to 
this — "1 profess to believe every jot and tittle of the 
Scriptures to be true and divinely inspired ; but whatever 
is asserted as true from those Scriptures is a mere human 
interpretation, which I am at liberty to receive or reject 
just as I please. All truth is in the Bible, but I cannot 
be certain of any one truth from the Bible/'' This is both 
the worst hypocrisy and a contemptible idolatry. Against 
this evil, prevalent in more mitigated forms, Coleridge 
can hardly be too severe. But it by no means follows, 
because we ought to begin by prizing the Bible for the 
great truths it contains, even before a deliberate and en- 
lightened conviction of its plenary inspiration in every 
part, that growing light would not land us finally in that 
very truth, from which most of us, blessed be God, are 
taught in our childhood to set out, as our chart and 
compass in the research of saving doctrines. It is foolish 
to profess unbounded veneration for the Scriptures, while 
neglecting those great truths of redemption which arc the 
groundwork and source of all their messages. It is like the 
zeal of the Capernaites to make our Lord a king, when 
blind to His secret and divine glory. But though He 
withdrew Himself from these zealots, it is not less true 
that He will yet be manifested as the King of Israel. 
The real lesson is that none can behold his visible king- 
dom who have not first received Him as the Author and 
Source of spiritual grace. So a zeal for the verbal inspi- 
ration of the Scriptures is worse than useless, when 
severed from faith in the great mysteries of redemj^tion. 



coleridge's cobfbsslons. 

But when those truths are devoutly received, the inspi- 
ration of God's "Word will shine out clearly; as Christ,, 
soon after He withdrew from the multitudes, appeared to 
His faithful disciples in "kingly glory on the holy nioun- 

The parallel may be traced further. It was n 
the disciples, but three only, who had this earnest of His 
glory before the resurrection. And so also, while many 
Christians may have an external, unripe faith in the in- 
spiration of the Scriptures, a full, deep, and ripe convic- 
tion of its truth is a high privilege, and belongs to those 
who receive heartily its central doctrines, and cleave t 
it in meditation and prayer, as those three Apostles to 
the footsteps : their Lord. The zeal of some nominal 
Christians for the Bible may be little better than that of 
M : slems for their Koran ; but how wide the differ- 
ence between the, objects of that zeal! On one side, an 
impostor and a strange rhapsody; on the other, God's 
perfect word, and His own coequal and eternal Son. 

Let. II. p. 13 47 . "In my last letter I said that 
in the Bible is more that finds me than in all other be >ks 
put together ; that the words of the Bible find me at 
greater depths of my being ; and that whatever finds me 
brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having pro- 
.-i from the Holy Spirit." 

In this letter Coleridge begins to tread on slippery 
ground. And first, as to the opening principle. It is 
plain that a Scripture truth must be held with a deeper 
and truer faith, when it finds & response in the conscience 
and will, than when no string of the heart vibrates in 
unison with its heavenlv touch. Such faith alone fully 



70 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

deserves the name (John iv. 43) . But may I infer that 
whatever does not yet find me is not Divine ? May such 
a negative article be tacked upon my creed without 
danger ? What would this imply, but that the present 
attainments of every Christian are to be the standard of 
God's Word, and not that Word the standard of his 
attainments ? Would it not go far to provide the infidel 
with an excuse for the total rejection of Scripture? 
Might he not say, They do not find me, and therefore I 
cannot receive them as Divine ? Our Lord's rebuke 
would be the true answer, " But ye believe not, because 
my words have no place in you/'' The words may be 
perfect and Divine, and yet some of them may not find 
us, just because our hearts are unclean, or at least too 
contracted and narrow for truth so large and so various. 
In all that follows, Coleridge seems to misconceive the 
doctrine against which he argues. Plenary inspiration 
needs to be distinguished from partial or imperfect inspi- 
ration on one side, but not less from mechanical dictation 
on the other. Now it is this last against which he argues 
throughout, and this is as remote from the general view 
as that which he himself mentions. The difference is 
evident. The mechanical dictation of Scripture would 
supersede altogether the will, conscience, and affections 
of the inspired writers, and reduce them to useful auto- 
mata, penholders, and nothing more, of the Divine Spirit. 
What unnatural corollaries would result from such a view 
is self-evident. Mixed and imperfect inspiration, again, 
would reduce the Word of God to the same level with 
the writings of any other good men, or the works of 



coleridge's confessions. 71 

Chrysostom, Luther, or Leighton. Plenary inspiration 
differs from both. It supposes and assumes the spiritual 
will and enlightened understanding of the inspired pen- 
men to be the channels of the truth ; but it recognizes in 
their words, "good measure, pressed down, shaken to- 
gether, and running over/'' with the still deeper wisdom 
of the Holy Ghost. In short, that the Spirit of God so 
guided, prompted, and overruled their thoughts and their 
words, as to make them the means of transmitting a 
complete and integral part of that Revelation, which His 
omniscient wisdom, from the first, designed to convey to 
the sons of men. Thus, while the sacred writers would 
have, to a certain extent, a full and intelligent concurrence 
with the messages they are used to deliver, there would 
be a further meaning, which they might not themselves 
apprehend, reserved for some distant age. And this 
agrees fully with repeated declarations of Holy Writ, 
1 Pet. i. 10—12. Dan. viii. 26; xii. 8—10. Surely 
instead of " planting thorns and placing snares in God's 
vineyard/"' this view tends to remove them, while it helps 
us to see reflected, on the dewdrop in every thornbrake, 
some beam of the glory of the Sun of Righteousness. 

P. 16 (50). "Let us therefore remove all such pas- 
sages, and take each book by itself, and I repeat that I 
believe the writer in whatever he himself relates of his 
own authority, and of its origin. But I cannot find any 
such claim as the doctrine in question supposes, made by 
these writers, explicitly or by implication. On the con- 
trary, they refer to other documents, and in all points 
express themselves as sober-minded and veracious 



72 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

writers under ordinary circumstances are known to 
do." 

There are here two objections. First, that the writers 
do not affirm their own plenary inspiration. Now in the 
books of Moses, Coleridge admits that there can be no 
dispute. " I find it asserted," he says, " that not only 
the words were given, but the recording of the same 
enjoined by the special command of God, and doubtless 
executed under the special guidance of the Divine Spirit." 
In the Prophets, again, most of their messages have that 
solemn preface, " Thus saith the Lord," &c. The objec- 
tion, in the Old Testament, applies mainly to the later 
historical books. But the honesty of the record, and the 
general truth of the facts being admitted, it was of minor 
importance, for a time, whether these were thought to be 
properly inspired. Also the Spirit of God, in the pro- 
phets, was a spirit of meekness, and not of self-exaltation. 
As even Christ glorified not himself to be made an high 
priest, it is less surprising that the prophets, in these 
cases, should not declare explicitly the inspiration of their 
own narratives. In the New Testament, however, the 
evidence is abundant, and one sentence alone of our Lord 
ought to decide it, Matt. v. 17, 18. It seems hard to 
conceive how the doctrine could be more plainly and 
strongly affirmed. 

A second objection is the reference to other writers. 
But this is fully consistent with the only just view of 
inspiration. Our Saviour's own reference to the Baptist 
in proof of his Divine authority is an exact parallel. In 
itself it was needless, but for the weakness of others it 



Coleridge's confessions. 73 

was desirable, a merciful condescension of love. " These 
things I say that ye may be saved." God is too gracious 
to deny us all secondary helps to our faith, even in His 
inspired word. 

Again, there is no petitio principii, because many of the 
most conclusive passages are found in the words of our 
Lord himself, whom no Christian can suppose liable to 
mistakes and errors, even if lax enough to charge the 
Apostles with erroneous statements. The indirect manner 
in which the doctrine is affirmed is easily explained. An 
astronomer, who wishes to show an occultation or transit 
through a powerful telescope, does not distract his pupil 
in the midst of the observation, by stopping him to 
observe the skilful structure of the object-glass itself. 
This would only confuse his vision, and he will learn it by 
natural inference, when once the observation is complete. 
So also with the telescope of the inspired Word. Its 
Divine completeness is best learned, after we have expe- 
rienced its sufficiency for its great objects, doctrine, 
reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. 

P. 17 (51) note. " With one seeming exception, the 
texts in question refer to the Old Testament alone. That 
exception is 2 Pet. iii. 16. The word \oiiras is perhaps 
not necessarily so to be interpreted ; and this very text 
formed one of the objections to the Apostolic antiquity 
of the Epistle itself/'' 

It is a groundless assertion that even 2 Tim. iii. 16, 
17, refers to the Old Testament alone. For in the former 
Epistle to Timothy St. Paul has already quoted St. 
Luke's Gospel as Scripture, 1 Tim. v. 18. Luke x. 7. 



74 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

All his own Epistles, too, were now written. The first 
had been commended to the Churches with the solemnity 
of an oath, and as the Word of God, 1 Thess. v. 27; ii. 13; 
iv. 15 ; and in another the Corinthians were charged to 
receive his Epistle as " the commandment of the Lord." 
There are also two other texts, James iv. 5, and Jude 17, 
which refer, I believe, to Gal. v. 17 — 21, and 2 Pet. 
iii. 5. The word \onra<$, again, must of course include 
St. Paul's Epistles under the common name of Scrip- 
tures ; and the text, far from being an objection to the 
genuineness of St. Peter's Epistle, is one of the clearest 
and strongest proofs of its authenticity. 

P. 20 (53). "The Old and New Testament is but one 
Word, even the Word of God; and the letters and arti- 
culate sounds by which this Word is communicated to 
our human apprehensions, are likewise Divinely commu- 
nicated. . . . This is the doctrine which I reject as super- 
stitious and unscriptural. And yet as long as the con- 
ceptions of the revealing Word and the inspiring Spirit 
are identified and confounded, I assert that whatever says 
less than this says little more than nothing. For how 
can absolute infallibility be blended with fallibility? 
Where is the infallible criterion? How can infallible 
truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible ex- 
pressions ? " 

This is the real difficulty of the whole question. It is 
one which every system, whether it err from the truth on 
the right hand or the left, must somewhere encounter. 
Nor is the divergence of Coleridge from the common view 
so wide as it may at first appear. Both agree that the 



Coleridge's confessions. 75 

Bible contains a rich, large, and most precious treasury 
of saving and eternal truth. Both agree that, as it 
comes to the hands of Christians in general, through 
copyists or translators, it has contracted somewhat of 
human imperfection. Copvists may have mistaken a few 
letters or words. The true reading, in several passages, 
may be uncertain. The best translators have sometimes 
missed the exact sense of the original. What, then, is 
the real difference ? Coleridge extends to the first auto- 
graphs the same principle which is commonly limited to 
secondary copies or mere translations. The distinction 
is very important, but not all-important. The great evil 
of his view is the latitude it gives to an elastic conscience 
for evading the authority of any part of God's Word, 
while still professing to pay it a general respect and 
deference. This is indeed a most serious danger. But 
the question still remains, how and where can fallibility 
be blended with infallibility ? First, in the person of our 
Lord we see infallible truth in a human personality, 
employing the words of human language. That which 
was, in our Lord, a constant and unfailing reality, is 
quite conceivable in His chosen disciples on special and 
temporary occasions, designed for the lasting instruction 
and guidance of the Church. Only in our Lord the 
Spirit, who rested on Him without measure, rested on 
One completely able to receive and comprehend the 
heavenly gift in all its fulness. In the sacred writers the 
same Spirit not only fills but overflows the vessel by 
which his truth is conveyed ; He not only occupies and 
quickens to its fullest limit the fallible intelligence, but 



76 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

puts a meaning into the words beyond the reach of the 
writer's own comprehension. See Eph. iii. 17. 20. This 
may be mysterious, but is neither unnatural nor incon- 
ceivable. 

Let. III. p. 25 (57). "I freely confess that my whole 
heart would turn away with angry impatience from the 
cold and captious mortal who, the moment I had been 
pouring out the love and gladness of my soul, while book 
after book, law, and truth, and example, oracle, and lovely 
hymn, and choral song of ten thousand thousands, and 
accepted prayers of saints and prophets, sent back, as it 
were, from heaven, like doves, to be let loose with a new 
freight of spiritual joys and griefs, were passing across 
my memory, at the first pause of my voice, and while my 
countenance was still speaking, should ask me whether I 
was thinking of the Book of Esther, or meant particu- 
larly to include the first six chapters of Daniel, or verses 
six to twenty of the 109th Psalm, or the last verse of the 
137th Psalm?" 

The sudden interruption might be unseasonable and 
in bad taste. But the graver question is, would this 
" captious mortal " have any ground for his captiousness ? 
Would he not be wrong as well as troublesome ? The 
previous description of the Word of God, in its general 
character, is vivid and beautiful. Are the exceptions 
sound? 

To begin with the plainest, and yet perhaps, in Cole- 
ridge's view, the hardest instance, Ps. cix. 6 — 20. Has 
he forgotten the words of St. Peter, fresh from closest 
intercourse with the risen Saviour, on this very passage ? 



coleridge's confessions. 77 

c< This Scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the 
Holy Spirit by the mouth of David spake before concerning 1 
Judas, which was guide to them that took Jesus . . . 
And let another take his office/' Acts i. 16 — 22. That 
very passage which Coleridge selects for doubt and 
excision, as not agreeing with reason and the moral 
sense, is one of those for which the direct inspiration 
of the Holy Ghost is most fully and unequivocally 
claimed by the first of the Apostles, just after the time 
when the Lord had " opened his understanding to under- 
stand the Scriptures/' and had doubtless expounded this 
very text along with the others "in the Psalms concern- 
ing Himself/' Luke xxiv. 44, 45. Surely it should teach 
a lesson of humility and caution, when such a man as 
Coleridge, intending to set others right, could be guilty 
of so strange an oversight. The Holy Spirit seems to 
provide a secret fence for the doctrine of entire inspira- 
tion in the very parts where it is most assailable on a 
careless view. This Scripture must needs have been ful- 
filled. It is the same phrase our Lord employs in speak- 
ing of His own pre-ordained sufferings, Acts i. 16. Luke 
xxii. 37 ; xxiv. 46. It implies a necessity resulting 
from the prophecy, and the truthfulness of God. 

But next, the Book of Esther. Surely there is nothing 
here repugnant to the reason or moral sense. Whence, 
then, can the doubt arise? Is it from its purely his- 
torical character ? But this would apply to one-half of 
the Bible. Is it from the absence of all moral purpose ? 
The moral stands out in the boldest relief. Is it from 
want of connexion with the rest of the sacred history ? 



78 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

It is one main link in that preservation of the chosen 
seed, on which depended the fulfilment of the promise of 
Messiah, the seed of Abraham. Is it the want of testi- 
mony to its historical trnth ? The feast of Purim, then 
appointed to preserve the memory of the deliverance, has 
been observed for more than two thousand years down to 
this very day. Is it from the absence of the name of 
God? Coleridge, surely, could not stoop to such an 
objection, though it has been brought by others. Does 
the Most High never conceal His name in the works of 
Nature and of Providence ? How, then, should the pro- 
phet exclaim, " Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, 
O God of Israel, our Saviour ? " The words marvellously 
correspond. Never was God more conspicuously " a God 
that hideth himself," and still the God of Israel, and 
their Saviour, than in the narrative of this book. The 
objection, when examined, becomes only a fresh sign of 
the Divine wisdom and beauty of the message. The 
whole book is like a marvellous parable of the whole course 
of God's secret Providence for two thousand three hun- 
dred years. Perhaps there is no history in the Bible 
which yields clearer signs, to a spiritual vision, of pro- 
ceeding, as its true Author, from the omniscient Spirit of 
God. 

Again, the u captious mortal" is supposed to object to the 
first six chapters of Daniel. Why to these alone, and not 
to the rest of the book, which is a complete whole, and the 
last part not less obnoxious to doubters than the first? 
The objection must relate either to the history or the 
prophecy. If to the history, St. Paul may answer, who 



coleeidge's confessions. 79 

includes Daniel and the Three Children among the most 
signal triumphs of faith, while they " stopped the mouths 
of lions, and quenched the violence of fire . " Heb . xi . 3 3, 3 4 . 
Would God, by his Apostle, borrow proofs of the energy 
and excellence of faith from historical falsehoods? Or 
else is it the prophetic part which awakens the misgiving ? 
"Why, then, does our Lord, in his only prophecy, single 
out "Daniel the prophet" for especial honour? The 
questions of ten thousand " captious mortals " are as dust 
in the balance, compared with the deliberate sanction of 
Him who is to be their Judge. 

The last passage objected is Ps. cxxxvii. 9. Let us 
compare with it Ezek. ix. 5, 6, where there is a direct 
message from God addressed to the prophet. By Cole- 
ridge's own definition the Divine character of the latter 
passage is not open to doubt. Yet what difficulty can lie 
against the Psalm, which does not lie with equal force 
against those words of the vision? Three things are 
clear — that all great national judgments or calamities 
have included the young; that God is righteous in those 
judgments, and delights in the execution of righteousness; 
and that the highest and best state of the creature is to 
have full sympathy with the Creator, alike in righteous- 
ness and mercy. Each of these is demonstrable both from 
Scripture and reason. Combine them, and what diffi- 
culty remains, but the constant difficulty of the natural 
heart, which cannot easily be moulded into harmony 
of thought and will, either with the severity of God's 
holiness, or the tenderness of His compassion and 
grace ? 



80 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

P. 26 (58). "In the course of my Lectures on 
Dramatic Poetry, I, in half a score instances, referred 
my auditors to the precious volume before me, Shak- 
speare, and spoke enthusiastically both in general and 
with detail of particular beauties of the plays of Shak- 
speare, as in all their kinds and in relation to the purposes 
of their writer. Would it have been fair to infer an 
intention on my part to decide the question respecting' 
Titus Andronicus, or the larger portion of the three 
parts of Henry IV. ? Would not every genial mind 
understand by Shakspeare the unity or total impression 
comprising and resulting from the thousandfold emotions 
of delight, admiration, and gratitude excited by his 
works ?" 

How deceptive an illustration ! Is it merely of the 
unity or general scope of Scripture that our Lord speaks 
when He says, " Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or 
one tittle shall not pass from the law, till all be ful- 
filled?" "It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, 
than for one tittle of the law to fail." " This Scripture 
must be fulfilled that is written ... for even the things 
that concern Me have a fulfilment." " The Scripture 
cannot be broken." It is unaccountable how Coleridge 
could read these and many other texts in the Gospels, 
and still conceive the case he has supposed to be analo- 
gous. They are wide as the poles asunder. If I had said, 
"Every jot and tittle of Shakspeare bears the full and 
clear impress of his wonderful genius," I should plainly 
express a strong opinion on the genuineness of all that 
is usually ascribed to him, unless at the time, or else- 



coleridge's confessions. 81 

where, I specified the plays or passages which I held 
to be spurious additions to his works. But where, in 
the Gospels or Epistles, are the specified exceptions 
to be found ? The parallel, then, fails entirely. 

P. 30 (62). "If the doctrine be less decisively Scrip- 
tural in its application to the New Testament, the 
temptation to doubt is likewise less. In point of fact 
it is the apparent or imagined contrast, the diversity 
of spirit, which sundry individuals have believed them- 
selves to find in the Old Testament and in the Gospel, 
that has given occasion to the doubt, and in the hearts 
of thousands supplies fuel to a fearful wish, that it were 
permitted to make a distinction." 

Here is an admission which seems to let in a stream 
of light on the whole argument. The objection, it 
seems, springs mainly from a repugnance to the real 
or fancied severity of certain passages in the Old Testa- 
ment. But are there no severe and solemn statements 
in the New Testament ? Let Matt. xxii. or Mark ix. or 
Rev. xiv. xviii. supply the answer. No doubt it is 
much harder for guilty creatures to rise into sympathy 
with the Divine judgments, than to acquiesce in a vague 
and general impression of God's mercy. But are we 
therefore to cut and carve the words of Scripture, re- 
jecting those which are distasteful to us ? or to pray for 
fuller light, that every colour, whether bright or dark, 
in the rainbow of the Divine perfections, may receive 
a true reflection in the inmost depths of our soul ? 
Surely this last is the safer and higher course, the only 
one which it befits the humble Christian to pursue. 

G 



82 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

P. 31 (62). "Why should I not believe the Scriptures 
throughout to be dictated, in word and thought, by an 
Infallible Intelligence? I admit the fairness of the 
question, and eagerly and earnestly do I answer : — 
For every reason that makes me prize and revere these 
Scriptures, — prize them, love them, revere them beyond 
all other books. Why should I not? Because the 
doctrine in question petrifies at once the whole body 
of Holy Writ, with all its harmonious and symmetrical 
gradations, the flexible and the rigid, the supporting hard, 
and the clothing soft, the blood which is the life, the 
intelligencing nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft 
and springy cellular substance, in which all are embedded 
and lightly bound together, — this breathing organism, 
which I have seen stand on its feet as a man, with a man's 
voice given to it, the doctrine in question turns at once 
into a colossal Memnou's head, a hollow passage for a 
voice, a voice that, mocks the voices of many men, and 
speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice and the 
same, and no man uttered it, and never in a human 
heart was it conceived."" 

All this passage and its context fight with a shadow. 
It is the doctrine of a bare mechanical dictation, running 
through all Scripture, and not of plenary inspiration, 
that is really refuted. The doctrine of Scripture is 
that all is inspired, all true, but that some portions were 
directly dictated, the greater part communicated in 
another way. One doctrine may be so misstated or 
strained as to be confounded with the other, but few 
practical Christians or learned Divines really hold what 



Coleridge's confessions. _83 

is here assailed. What Christian supposes that David 
was a mere automaton in penning the Psalms which 
bear his name ? Who ever formed such a concep- 
tion of "the sweet Psalmist of Israel?" Who can 
doubt that even in Ps. xvi. many of the expressions 
were the utterance of his own feelings ? Yet his words 
were so overruled that they applied to himself only in part, 
while every syllable was fulfilled in his greater Son, the 
main object of prophecy, the true Messiah of God. 

Pp. 33 — 37 (65—68). " Curse ye Meroz, said the angel 
of the Lord ; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, 
sang Deborah. Was it that she called to mind any 
personal wrongs, rapine, or insult that she or the house 
of Lapidoth had received from Jabin or Sisera? No, 
she had dwelt under her palm-tree in the depth of the 
mountain. But she was a mother in Israel, with a 
mother's heart, and with the vehemency of a mother's 
and a patriot's love ; she had shot the light of love from 
her eyes, and poured the blessings of love from her lips, 
on the people that had jeoparded their lives unto death 
against the oppressors ; and the bitterness awakened and 
borne aloft by the same love, she precipitated in curses 
on the selfish and coward recreants who came not to the 
help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the 
mighty. As long as I have the image of Deborah before 
my eyes, and throw myself back into the age, country, 
circumstances of this Hebrew Bonduca (Boadicea?), in 
the not yet tamed chaos of the spiritual creation; as 
long as I contemplate the impassioned, high-souled, 
heroic woman, in all the prominence and individuality 
g 2 



84 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

of will and character, I feel as if I were among the first 
ferment of the great affections, the prophetic waves of 
the microcosmic chaos, swelling up against, yet towards, 
the outspread wings of the Dove that lies brooding on 
the troubled waters. So long all is well, replete with 
instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate I am 
made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer 
radiance which shines on the Christian's path, neither 
blunted by the preparatory veil, nor crimsoned in its 
struggle through the mist of the world's ignorance ; 
while in the self-oblivion of these heroes of the Old 
Testament, their elevation above all low and individual 
interests ; above all, in the entire and vehement devotion 
of their total being to the service of their Divine Master, 
I find a lesson of humility, a ground of humiliation, 
and a shining yet rousing example of faith and fealty. 
But let me once be persuaded that all these heart- 
awakening utterances of human hearts, of men of like 
passions with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, 
triumphing, are but a Divine Comedia of a superhuman 
Ventriloquist, that the royal harper to whom I have 
so often submitted myself as a many-stringed instru- 
ment for his firetipt fingers to traverse, while every 
nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh 
and blood of our common humanity, responded to the 
touch — that this sweet Psalmist of Israel was himself as 
mere an instrument as his harp, an automaton mourner, 
poet, suppliant ; all is gone, all sympathy at least, and 
all example. I listen in awe and fear, but likewise in 
perplexity and confusion of spirit/'' 



colekidge's confessions. 85 

"Yet one other instance, and let this be the crucial 
test of the doctrine. Say that the Book of Job through- 
out was dictated by an Infallible Intelligence. Then re- 
peruse the Book, and still, as you proceed, try to apply 
the test ; try if you can even attach any meaning, or 
semblance of meaning, to the speeches which you are 
reading. What ! were the hollow truisms, the unsumcing 
half-truths, the false assumptions and malignant insinua- 
tions of the supercilious bigots, who corruptly defended 
the truth ; were the impressive facts, the piercing out- 
cries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful 
reasoning with which the poor sufferer, smarting at 
once from his wounds, and from the oil of vitriol which 
the orthodox liars for God were dropping into them, im- 
patiently, but uprightly and holily, controverted this truth, 
while in will and spirit he clung to it ; were both dictated 
by an Infallible Intelligence? Alas, if I may judge 
from the manner in which both indiscriminately are 
read, quoted, appealed to, treated upon, by the routiniers 
of desk and pulpit, I cannot doubt that they think so, or 
rather without thinking take for granted that so they 
are to think; the more readily, perhaps, because the so, 
thinking supersedes the necessity of all after thought." 

There must be some strange misconception which 
entwines itself with the beautiful wreaths of poetry in 
this passage. Its general meaning seems to be — De- 
borah's zeal was noble and exalted, but fierce and in- 
ordinate ; and the words she uttered, while they teach a 
noble lesson of animating devotedness and self-oblivion, 
bear also the traces of human infirmity and bitterness, 



50 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

and may not without danger be ascribed to the Spirit 
of God in so full a sense as the orthodox doctrine re- 
quires. 

Now in this there is a double error. First, Coleridge 
overlooks one important clause — " Curse ye Meroz, said 
the angel of the Lord! 3 It is the Covenant Angel, the 
Divine Logos, to whom the words in question are really 
ascribed. By the rule which Coleridge himself allows, 
the passage has to be taken out of the category of mixed 
or imperfect inspiration. But further, if the words had 
been Deborah's own, what proof could they yield of a 
chaotic state of the affections, that would not apply 
equally to the parting words of our Lord to the 
Pharisees, Matt, xxiii. ? The liveliness of Deborah's 
emotions cannot disprove the inspiration of these words, 
without casting a deep and foul reproach upon the 
righteous severity of warnings uttered by the Incarnate 
Son of God. 

It might well be allowed that in Deborah's heart the 
Divine message caught something, in its reflection, of 
earthly weakness. Her zeal for God may have been 
mingled with national zealotry, and her love for Israel 
with secret kindlings of martial pride, or even her 
denunciations of Meroz with secret whispers of self- 
righteous exaltation. But the light of heaven is not 
less pure when it shines on a troubled stream. The 
inspired song of praise which she sang need not be less 
pure and holy, because its echo, even in the heart of the 
Prophetess, might catch from the imperfectly regenerated 
soul some jarring dissonance. The truth of inspiration, 



Coleridge's confessions, 87 

rightly conceived, detracts nothing from the reality of 
deep emotions in the heart of the messenger, while it adds 
greatly to the authority, the fulness, and the glory of the 
message. The description applies to the earliest as well 
as the latest revelations — " The words of the Lord are 
pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified 
seven times in the fire."" Only it must be remembered 
that they are also purifying words ; and therefore, without 
losing their own purity, condescend both to seeming and 
real contact with persons and things impure. This 
is especially true in the first stages of the inward work 
of redemption, and, by parity of reason, in the earliest 
parts of Revelation. The light of heaven shone in the 
darkness. But it was only in order to turn it into 
brightness, abiding itself in spotless and stainless beauty. 

The second instance is equally misconceived. For 
what is the received doctrine with regard to the Royal 
Harper ? Not that we are to deny him his own title, 
given him by Scripture itself, the sweet Psalmist of 
Israel, but only that we are to acknowledge in his 
words that deeper and higher truth — " The Spirit of the 
Lord spake by me, and His words were on my tongue/'' 

How fully are both these truths, in their contrast, 
confirmed by our Lord himself in the New Testament ! 
Matt. xxii. 43—45. "Why then doth David himself 
in spirit call him Lord?" First, David speaks in his 
human person, else the contrast fails. And yet he 
speaks inspired and certain truth. David in spirit 
called him Lord. Our Saviour would surely never rest 
so wonderful a claim as that of proper Godhead on one 



88 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

solitary word of an uninspired man. The argument, on 
such a view, would be monstrous and indefensible. And 
this shows the dangerous tendency of that laxer school 
of thought which Coleridge has here espoused. 

Let us turn to what is called " the crucial test " of the 
Book of Job. Here, with all due respect be it spoken, 
Coleridge is surprisingly rash and unaccountably super- 
ficial. The subject has its real difficulties. But he 
does not solve one of them, and quite misunderstands 
the common view. First, the book is a narrative, and 
not, as he elsewhere explains it, with several German 
theologians, a dramatic fiction. See Ezek. xiv. Jas. v. 11. 
Surely no one was ever so foolish as to suppose that 
in every inspired narrative the words of every speaker 
are inspired, as the blasphemies of Pharaoh, and the lies 
of the old prophet of Bethel. Still, the record of these 
may be from the All-wise Spirit, no less than the record 
of the words of Prophets and Apostles. And again, 
when God expressly rebukes them in the words, "Ye 
have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my 
servant Job hath/'' who can infer at once that all the 
words of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, are in every sense 
inspired truth ? Inspiration, then, does not, of itself, 
require us to pronounce upon the statements of Job 
and his friends. Both were reproved by God himself, 
though with unequal censure. 

But here a second question arises. Were their dis- 
courses simply false, or merely truth ill-timed and mis- 
applied? We can scarcely read them without being 
driven to the latter view. And this is strongly con- 



coleridge's confessions. 89 

firmed by St. Paul's authority, who quotes from the 
first speech of Eliphaz as inspired Scripture (1 Cor. iii. 19. 
Job v. 13). Surely, then, even the routiniers have no 
despicable authority for the practice Coleridge treats 
as absurd. What was Divine wisdom in the Apostle 
need not be denounced, in their case, as mere thoughtless 
folly. Like Job's friends, they may sometimes grievously 
misapply the truth they borrow. But this is equally 
possible with texts of the most unquestionable inspiration, 
as the Sermon on the Mount, or the words of Christ 
respecting the after-life of the beloved disciple. 

In truth, Coleridge seems to have a very faulty view 
of the book on which he grounds his censure. He 
seems wholly to invert Elihu's character, and even adds 
darker features to the other friends than the account 
will justify. To treat them merely as malignant, super- 
cilious bigots, is simple caricature. They were true 
friends, and their tears and silence attested the depth and 
sincerity of their sorrow. They were righteous men, 
and zealous for God and for righteousness. But they 
lived in a time of dimmer light, when godliness had 
eminently the promise of the life that now is ; and Job 
was dealt with after the law of a higher dispensation, 
the main features of which were still unknown. Hence 
their affection, tears, and honour, from imperfect know- 
ledge of God's ways, were soon turned into doubt, 
censure, suspicion, and at last into direct calumny. The 
words they uttered were, in the main, sacred truths, but 
truths misapplied, that wrought the effect of calumnious 
falsehood. 



90 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

Let. IV. p. 39 (68). "If, with the exception of the 
passages already excepted, the recorded words of God, 
the Tenet in this sense be inapplicable to the Scripture, 
destructive of its noblest purposes, contradictory to its 
own express declarations, again and again, I ask, What am 
I to substitute ? What other sense is conceivable that 
does not destroy the doctrine it professes to interpret — 
that does not convert it into its own negative ? " 

What a surprising leap does Coleridge here make in 
reaching his conclusion ! It is absurd to think that the 
recorded speeches of Pharaoh, or Saul, or the old pro- 
phet, or Rab shaken, or Sanballat, or the orator Tertullus, 
are inspired truth; and therefore the Scriptures which 
record these sayings cannot be inspired, or purely and 
wholly true. Surely, to a simple mind, there is a wide 
open space between these limits. A record may be 
inspired truth selected by the Holy Spirit, and still it 
may recount many sayings of wicked men, and even 
sayings of good men that are neither true nor wise. 
The expostulation is aimed against a sentiment which 
hardly any one has ever espoused ; the argument against 
a doctrine which our best and soundest divines have 
ever maintained, as taught directly by our Lord's own 
emphatic sayings. 

The next objection is against the minute correctness of 
the Scripture histories, a topic wholly distinct from the 
former, with which it seems to be confounded. 

Let us examine this new objection for a moment. 
And first, what does Coleridge himself allow ? That the 
discrepancies are so trifling as to make it highly pro- 



coleridge's confessions. 91 

bable, in some instances, and perhaps possible in all, 
that they are only apparent. Can such difficulties, then, 
be a sufficient reason for setting aside a doctrine which 
seems to be many times asserted by our Lord himself, 
and without which the fence is removed from the Word 
of God, so that every one may feel at liberty to receive 
just as much or as little as falls in with his own pre- 
possessions ? Surely not ! 

Again, allowing that many harmonies have been de- 
fective, is it needful to reflect their errors in imputations 
against the narratives themselves? Coleridge seems to 
have been misled by the theories of the German divines 
of last century, first imported into this country by 
Bishop Marsh. The analogy of human histories is very 
deceptive, when we remember the vast importance of 
the revelation, and the character of the Gospels as the 
law of faith to the Christian Church. For if it was 
true of the law of Moses that not one jot or tittle 
could pass till all was fulfilled, surely the same might 
be affirmed of the Gospels, whose brighter light throws 
even the former into the shade. The words of Greswell 
are here very true : cc Some of the events are falsely 
reputed to be the same, and are not even similar ; others 
are proved by the testimony of the same Gospel to have 
happened more than once. And it is far better, on 
every principle, that either actions or discourses should 
be considered to have occurred again, than that the 
historians should be set at variance, and their credibility 
be endangered, by obstinately pronouncing such events 
to be the same. There is little antecedent improbability 



92 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

in the former, while there is the utmost hazard to 
Christian truth in the latter. In a ministry of three 
years' duration, every day of which was similarly em- 
ployed, a great deal of historical matter must and would 
come over again, the same incidents frequently transpire, 
similar and almost identical miracles be performed ; and 
any one Evangelist who had recorded such things in 
one instance of their occurrence, might pass them over 
for that very reason in another. And this is precisely 
the case : they are not found twice over in the same 
Gospel, nor at corresponding points of time in different 
Gospels. ... If such and such parts of their narrative 
are not actually the same, it is in vain to attempt to 
make them so, without submitting them to a torture 
like that of the bed of Procrustes. " 

P. 43 (71). " Here there can be neither more nor less. 
Important or unimportant gives no ground of difference, 
and the number of the writers as little. The secretaries 
may have been many, the historian was one and the 
same, and He infallible. This is the minor of the syllo- 
gism."" . . . 

No difference ! yes, a great difference. Let us con- 
sider three or four conceivable hypotheses. First, that 
every writer was divinely inspired, and his hand infallibly 
guided, and every copyist and translator also miraculously 
overruled, so that no cursive error in mistranslation 
should ever mar the perfection of the Scripture copies 
and versions. Secondly, that the writers were inspired, 
and their mind infallibly guided, and their hand also 
miraculously or providentially overruled in writing, but 



Coleridge's confessions. 93 

copyists and translators left to the common laws of 
providence and of human infirmity. Thirdly, that the 
minds of the writers were inspired with perfect truth, 
clothed in fit expressions, but their hand, as amanuenses 
of the unwritten word, liable to error like their own 
copyists. Fourthly, that they were infallibly inspired 
as to doctrine, but only assisted or indirectly guided, in 
various degrees, with regard to facts of history. Fifthly, 
that in historical matters they were left wholly to their 
own natural and unaided diligence. Sixthly, that in 
points of doctrine their inspiration was nothing more 
than those promptings of God's Spirit which are common 
to all writers who are good and honest men. 

Now the first view alone leads to a result mathe- 
matically and absolutely complete. In all the others 
the question is one of degree, since no one ever saw or 
read in one volume all the autographs of the two 
Testaments. The difference between the second and 
third is comparatively unimportant. That between the 
third and fourth might be so, if the suspensions of full 
inspiration, replaced by partial suggestion, were few, 
and we had any test by which to discern them. But 
since these conditions are plainly wanting, the difference, 
which in the abstract might be small, becomes vast 
and momentous. Either on the second or third hypo- 
thesis, the slight variation of our present copies from 
the Divine autograph, mental or external, might be 
passed by in silence in a general statement of the doc- 
trine of inspiration. But, on the other hypothesis, we 
cannot really be sure of any part that it is the word 



94 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

of God, and not merely the mistaken assertion of fallible 
men. 

P. 43 (71). " In fact, it is clear that the harmonists 
and their admirers held and understood the doctrine 
literally. And must not that divine likewise have so 
understood it, who, in answer to a question concerning' 
the transcendent blessedness of Jael, and the righteous- 
ness of the act in which she inhospitably, treacherously, 
perfidiously murdered sleep, the confiding sleep, closed 
the controversy by observing that he wanted no better 
morality than that of the Bible, no other proof of an 
action being praiseworthy than that the Bible declared 
it worthy to be praised ? " 

How much better, though far more difficult, to untie 
the knot in a case like this, than by rudely and hastily 
cutting it to endanger the faith of Christians in the 
most solemn statements of the word of God! No 
doubt it is true that it is far better that a single text 
should be set aside, than to contravene the whole scope 
and tenour of revealed truth. But is .the difficulty 
inexplicable ? The case resembles that of the mid- 
wives, of RahaVs treatment of the spies, of the 
Gibeonites and others. In all these the action is mixed. 
There was real faith in God, and that He was a party 
in the controversy against the sin of the Canaanites, 
and the oppressions of Jabin. But approval of the 
faith, which in each case was the mainspring of the 
action, by no means implies an approval of the deceit 
by which that faith was attended, and its true character 
obscured. Yet faith in God is precious and blessed, 



coleridge's confessions. 95 

even in spite of a grievous intermixture of corruption 
or infirmity; because,, as it grows and strengthens, it 
has power to root out and destroy the very evils and 
corruptions which disguise and obscure its moral beauty. 
But to adopt the principle in the " Confessions " would 
tend to abolish all use of Scripture as a moral guide. 

Pp. 45. 73 — "Or who exclaims ' wonderful/ when 
they hear that Sir M. Hale sent a crazy old woman 
to the gallows, in honour of the witch of Endor ? " 

This passage is merely an appeal to the prejudices 
of an anti-spiritual and Sadducean age. To the sincere 
believer in God's word, Sir M. Hale's belief in the 
existence of witches is far more reasonable than Cole- 
ridge's professed disbelief in the existence of angels. 
There is no good reason for doubting the truth of Sir 
Matthew's dictum, whatever be thought of the appli- 
cation. To those who have any adequate view of the 
power and malice of evil spirits, and the corruption 
of sinful men, the wonder will not be that witchcraft 
should exist, but that distinct cases of its occurrence 
should be so rare. But it seems a part of the Divine 
economy that, while the open agency of good angels 
is restrained or suspended, the malice of bad angels 
should be put under a like restraint. Nor does it seem 
that the double embargo will be removed, at least until 
some brief hour of especial temptation, before the full 
revelation of the kingdom of God. 

Pp. 45, 46 (74, 75). " But I challenge these divines 
and their adherents to establish the compatibility of 
a belief in the modern astronomy and natural philo- 



96 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

sophy with their and Wesley's doctrine respecting the 
inspired Scriptures, without reducing the doctrine itself 
to a plaything of wax."" 

How inconsistent with Coleridge's own admission at 
p. 24 (48), where he says that incompatibility exists 
only between "the first and second," or the language 
of sense and of science, both of them being " indifferent 
and of equal value to the third," or the language of 
philosophy ! Yet here that the Bible employs consistently 
the language of sense is made an argument against its 
full inspiration, in the teeth of his own express decision. 
The simile of the bladder is as wholly inapplicable as 
it is pretty and ingenious. 

P. 46 (75) . "Now I pray, which is the more honest . . . 
self-justification." 

It may be the less of two evils to adopt a lowered 
theory of inspiration, and still to bring a cautious and 
reverent spirit to the perusal of Scripture in each 
particular case ; rather than in terms to assert loudly the 
full perfection of the Bible, and then to treat it with a 
bold, presumptuous spirit, distorting it, without scruple, 
into the mould of systems of human manufacture, or 
subjecting it to all the rash glosses of a wild and untamed 
imagination. But the less of two great evils is not 
therefore a good. The thoughtful Christian will desire 
to be kept far from either of these errors. No doubt, 
when the evil heart of unbelief prevails, every truth 
retained becomes a fresh occasion of scandal and sin. 
But this is no just reason for paring down our creed 
to a minimum, under the vain fancy that we shall 



coleridge's confessions. 97 

thus deter others from stumbling at the threshold of 
faith to their own ruin. 

P. 47. "When in my third letter I first asked the 
question, Why should I not ? the answers came crowding 
to my mind. I am well content, however, to have 
merely suggested the main points, in proof of the 
positive harm our religion sustains from this doctrine. 
Of minor importance, yet not to be overlooked, are the 
forced and fantastic interpretations, the arbitrary alle- 
gories, and mystic expressions of proper names to which 
this Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A still 
greater evil, and less attributable to the visionary 
humour and weak judgment of the individual expositors, 
is the literal rendering of Scripture in passages which 
the number and variety of the images employed to 
express one and the same variety plainly mark out for 
figurative. " 

These two objections really destroy one another. 
What ! the same doctrine teach us to allegorize the 
literal and to literalize the allegorical ! This is tirade 
and mere prejudice, not argument. The objection is 
merely this, that faith in the inspiration of the Scriptures 
cannot ensure perfect wisdom in their interpretation, 
and does not hinder many expositors from diverging 
widely from Coleridge's own judgment on the question, 
what is literal and what figurative. Such errors, even 
admitting their reality to the extent implied by his 
words, are in no respect chargeable on the doctrine 
under review. The only way in which it could affect 
them is by giving a deeper sense of the vast importance 

H 



98 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

of the Scriptures, and thereby securing to them a greater 
measure of thought and careful study. 

P. 48 (76). "And lastly, add to all these the strange, 
in all other writings unexampled, practice of bringing 
together into logical dependence detached sentences from 
books composed at the distance of centuries, nay, some- 
times a millennium from each other, under different dis- 
pensations, and for different objects." 

How strange and instructive that Coleridge here lays 
an indictment, which applies just as strongly to St. 
Paul as to preachers and writers of the present day ! 
For, passing by Hebrews, about the authorship of which 
he is sceptical, let any one read Rom. iii. ix. — xi., and 
he will see that the Apostle, taught by the Holy 
Spirit, does that repeatedly which is here denounced as 
unnatural and absurd. Nay, St. Peter lays this down 
for the first condition of true insight into Divine 
prophecy (2 Pet. i. 20, 21). The very first truth we 
need to learn for our guidance is, that no prophecy is 
an isolated composition of man, depending on itself 
alone for its solution, but must be solved by comparing 
it with the rest ; because all are parts of one harmonious 
system, of which the true Author is the Spirit of God. 
Nothing can be more flatly opposed to the rebuke which 
Coleridge here utters than this parting admonition of 
the great Apostle. 

P. 48 (76). "Accommodations of elder Scripture 
phrases, that favourite ornament of Jewish eloquence, 
incidental allusions to popular notions, traditions, apo- 
logues, as the dispute between the devil and the Arch- 



COLERIDGE S CONFESSIONS. \)\f 

angel about the body of Moses ; fancies and anachronisms 
imported from the synagogue of Alexandria by the 
Septuagint version, and applied as mere argumenta 
ad 7iominem, as the delivery of the law by the disposition 
of angels ; these, detached from their context, and, con- 
trary to the intention of the writer, first raised into 
independent theses, and then brought together to pro- 
duce some new credendum, for which neither separately 
could have furnished a pretence ! By this strange 
mosaic, Scripture texts have been worked up into possible 
likenesses of purgatory, Popery, the Inquisition, and 
other monstrous abuses." 

How true are those words of caution in Spenser — 

" He that erreth once from the right way, 
The further he doth go, the more doth go astray." 

The one grand error of the book misleads Coleridge, 
even with his deep thought, into minor errors without 
end. 

And first, as to this dispute of Michael and the devil, 
what evidence have we that such a tradition existed ? Or, 
supposing it did exist, how could this prove the idea to 
be groundless ? How strange and unnatural that, with 
abundance of instances to illustrate the sin, St. Jude 
should quote a groundless and vain tradition ! It would 
be just as natural to suppose that an Apostle would 
quote iEsop's Fables in one of his most earnest appeals 
to the conscience. And who can read Dan. x. and Zech. 
iv., and not feel the entire harmony between their state- 
ments and those in St. Jude ? Once suppose the whole 
h 2 



100 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

statement to be true, divinely inspired, and now revealed 
to the Apostle, and by him to the Church, and how solemn 
and impressive the whole passage will appear ! Suppose 
it to be mere fiction, with no answering event, and 
its solemnity disappears. It becomes worse than puerile 
folly. 

How strange, again, that such a mind could acquiesce 
in such an explanation, so meagre and shadowy, of the 
allusions to angels at the giving of the law ! Acts vii. 53. 
Gal. iii. 19. Heb. ii. 2. What! the touching, powerful, 
impressive discourse of the first martyr, of which the 
very object was to uproot the prejudices of the Jews, in 
the climax of its most earnest appeal to their conscience, 
contain the direct assertion of a falsehood, in order to 
flatter those prejudices at the moment when he is 
reproving them with just severity ! How monstrous the 
supposition ! And on what ground is it affirmed ? 
Because " it was imported from Alexandria with the 
Septuagint version." If Coleridge had studied the word 
of God more profoundly, he would have escaped these 
wretched trammels of German neology. The doctrine 
is taught as plainly as possible in Ps. lxviii., long before 
the date of the Greek version or the Alexandrian syna- 
gogue. Even apart from this distinct assertion, it might 
be inferred from the general current of Scripture. The 
voices as of a trumpet, and the flames of fire, if its uni- 
form tenour is to be our guide, were tokens of the presence 
of angels when the Lord came down upon the holy 
mount. 

P. 50 (78). " It will, perhaps, appear a paradox, if, 



Coleridge's confessions. 101 

after all these reasons, I should avow that they weigh 
less with me against the doctrine than the motives 
usually assigned for maintaining and enjoining it. Such, 
for instance, are the arguments drawn from the antici- 
pated damage that would result from its abandonment ; 
as that it would deprive the Christian Church of its only 
infallible arbiter in questions of Faith and Duty; sup- 
press the common and only inappellable tribunal ; that 
the Bible is the only religious bond of union and ground 
of unity among Protestants, and the like. For the con- 
futation of this reasoning it might be sufficient to ask, 
Has it produced these effects ? Would not the contrary 
statement be nearer to the fact ? - J 

The relative importance of the doctrine that all Scrip- 
ture is fully inspired may, doubtless, be overstated. It 
is overstated when this truth is magnified beyond its 
Scriptural proportions. If the Gospel of St. John con- 
tains, as we are told, truth enough for salvation (chap. 
xx. 30, 31), the same amount of inspired truth diffused 
through the Bible, the rest being uninspired, might, if it 
had pleased God so to reveal Himself, have sufficed for the 
same purpose. But though the doctrine is not primary, 
and does not, strictly speaking, enter into one of the 
Creeds, still, if true, it must be highly important, and 
cannot be rejected without loss to the soul, and casting 
some dishonour on the Holy Spirit and the word of God. 

The confutation in this passage proceeds wholly on 
false ground. Is it among those who own the full in- 
spiration of the Scriptures that heresies have been most 
rife ? Certainly not, either in ancient or modern times. 



102 NOTES ON INSPIRATION, 

The Gnostics, Valentinians, Marcionites, and Manicheans 
in early ages, and the Socinians and Neologians of later 
days, to whom we may add the Tridentine Church, with 
its Apocryphal Canon, are all of them cases in proof of 
this latter view. 

Pp. 51—53 (79, 80). "The Bible is the appointed 
conservatory, an indispensable criterion, and a continual 
source and support of true belief. But that the Bible is 
the sole source; that it not only contains, but constitutes, 
the Christian Religion ; that it is in short a Creed, con- 
sisting wholly of Articles of Faith ; that consequently 
we need no rule, help, or guides, spiritual or historical, 
to teach us what parts are and are not Articles of Faith, 
all being such . . . this scheme differs widely from the 
preceding, though its adherents often make use of the 
same words in expressing their belief. And this latter 
scheme was brought into currency by and in favour of 
those by whom the operation of grace, the aid of the 
Spirit, the need of regeneration, the corruption of our 
nature, all the peculiar mysteries of the Gospel were 
explained and diluted away." 

There may doubtless be an idolatry of the Bible, as of 
any other Divine gift ; and from this danger the Church 
has never been wholly free. Whatever some may assert, 
there is a real subordination in the various truths and 
doctrines of Scripture. To erect the Bible into the 
exclusive means of instruction and guidance, and there- 
upon to despise the Church, the Ministry, the Sacra- 
ments, or even the Book of Nature, is to contradict the 
Bible itself, and does violence to some of its most express 



coleridge's confessions. 103 

and solemn statements. The theory which starts with 
such a false assumption may naturally proceed, in a later 
stage, to reject the Person and work of the Holy Spirit ; 
and thus end by reducing" the Bible to a mere lifeless 
carcass, which the critic proceeds to carve and dissect at 
pleasure, with a loathsome familiarity of fancied anato- 
mical skill. 

Pp. 52—54 (80, 81). "And how have these men 
treated this very Bible ? . . . I, who hold that the Bible 
contains the religion of Christians, but who dare not say 
that whatever is contained in the Bible is the Christian 
religion — I tremble at the processes which the Grotian 
divines, without scruple, carry on in their treatment of 
the sacred writers, as soon as any texts declaring the 
peculiar tenets of our Faith are cited against them; 
which, according to my scheme, every Christian born in 
Church membership, ought to bring with him to the 
study of the sacred Scriptures as the master key of inter- 
pretation. Whatever the doctrine of infallible dictation 
be in itself, in their hands it is in the last degree nuga- 
tory. . . . Every sentence in a canonical book, rightly 
interpreted, contains the dictum of an infallible mind; 
but what the right interpretation is, or whether the 
words be corrupt or genuine, must be determined by the 
industry and understanding of fallible and prejudiced 
theologians ! " 

These remarks are forcible and true when applied to 
the Grotian school of divines. To hold in words the 
plenary inspiration of Scripture, while rejecting its funda- 
mental truths, is a wretched pretence or delusion. But 



104 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

what does this really prove ? That the doctrine in ques- 
tion cannot long be retained in a declining state of faith 
and spiritual life. Thus it forms a kind of spiritual 
barometer. Mere adhesion may sometimes keep the 
mercury to a high level when the sky is lowering ; but 
the least shock, almost a touch, reveals the declension, and 
the altered state of the atmosphere. Thus the doctrine in 
question may be outwardly retained for a moment, when 
the heart is revolting from the great truths of the Gospel ; 
but, after the first shock in the world of thought, Grotian 
divines will be succeeded by theologians of a bolder 
school, and a lowered view of the Bible, as a work merely 
human, will be openly and boldly maintained. The 
hypocrisy which Coleridge here condemns is most repul- 
sive to an ingenuous mind. To profess in words that the 
Scriptures are inspired, and then to ascribe to them a 
travesty of their real meaning, which would convict any 
other writer of incompetence or gross dishonesty, is 
miserable trifling. The only conclusion, however, which 
needs to be drawn, is the folly of poisoning children with 
strong meat unsuited to their weak appetite; or the 
worse folly of casting pearls before swine, who have no 
capacity to apprehend even the simplest lessons of the 
Christian faith. 

P. 54 (81). "And yet I am told that this doctrine 
must not be called in question, because of its fitness to 
preserve unity of faith. . . . For the prevention of an 
evil which already exists, and which the boasted preven- 
tive itself might rather seem to have occasioned, I must 
submit to be silenced by the first learned infidel who 



coleeidge's confessions. 105 

throws in my face the blessing of Deborah, or the 
cursings of David, or the grievous and heavier difficulties 
in the biographical chapters of the Book of Daniel, or 
the hydrography and natural philosophy of the Patri- 
archal ages. I must forego the prospect of convincing 
an alienated brother, because I must not answer, My 
brother, what has all this to do with the truth and worth 
of Christianity ? . . . Thorns are not flowers, nor is the 
husk serviceable. But it was not for its thorns, but for 
its sweet and medicinal flowers that the rose was culti- 
vated ; and he who cannot separate the husk from the 
grain, wants the power because sloth or malice has pre- 
vented the will." 

We are on slippery ground when we maintain 
any doctrine, true or false, on account of its supposed 
consequences alone. Truth, if it is to be held firmly, 
must be held for its own sake, and by the light of 
its own evidence. Our faith must else be a reed 
shaken with every wind ; for who can trace all the con- 
sequences of a single action, or of one solitary maxim in 
the world of thought ? Still, so far as results are trace- 
able, whatever is proved to be true will be found to be 
profitable. The notion, it has been well said, that faith 
will be confirmed by giving up subordinate points, 
rests entirely on self-deception. That it is contradicted 
by experience is easily shown. Is morality, for instance, 
strengthened, when we are careless in small matters, and 
seek to be right only in great ones ? Is not faithfulness 
in small things the surest means of moral improvement ? 
How much the assertion contradicts the nature of faith 



106 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

is confirmed by many instances where the doubts of 
unsettled minds find support on this very ground, and 
thence extend themselves to other points of the Christian 
faith. 

The whole tone of this page is very unhappy. It is 
not fair to allege that the doctrine is maintained merely 
as useful, with no prior conviction of its truth. It is no 
fair test of a doctrine being useful, to ask whether it has 
prevented all heresies. It is most unreasonable to make 
the garbled version of Socinians one consequence of a doc- 
trine, which it is notorious that most Socinians disclaim. 
It is not true that the doctrine has occasioned the evil of 
divisions. On the contrary, when those divisions run to 
seed, they invariably lead to a rejection of the doctrine, or 
efforts to lower it, as in German Neology, and Tracts for 
the Times on the chance-medley formation of Scripture. 

Again, the whole question is assumed, that the Christian 
needs to be silenced, that the difficulties are real, not 
imaginary. For why stay at the points selected ? If 
the " cursings of David " are such a stumbling-block, why 
not the " woes " denounced by the Son of David (Matt. 
xxiii.) ? If the Book of Daniel, quoted by our Lord, is 
to be set aside, why not the Apocalypse, with which the 
infidel quarrels just as strongly ? Take what Coleridge 
seems to think the strongest case : try it on grounds of 
pure reason, and how rash the assumption must appear ! 
If no action may have a blessing pronounced on it but 
one of unmingled moral goodness, no blessing could ever 
reach this fallen world. But if it be lawful for holy men, 
and, much more, for God himself, to pronounce a blessing 



coleeidge's confessions. 107 

on mingled actions, so that the good is dwelt upon and 
the evil passed by, who dare pretend, after three thousand 
years, to be wiser than Scripture, and to affirm that Jael's 
deed was unmingled sin? If there were a righteous 
zeal for God and His people, however much sin may 
have defiled it, who shall prescribe to the God of love 
and holiness, where He shall pronounce, and where He 
shall withhold His blessing? The presumption and 
the folly are enormous when, under the covert of such 
an axiom, the word of God is defamed and assailed. 
After Israel's foulest sins in the wilderness, it is said 
presently : " He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, nor 
seen perverseness in Israel/'' Must these words be 
another missile by which the infidel is to silence us, and 
prove the word of God immoral ? especially since here 
the miracle of the ass must be thrown into the scale. It 
is more important, doubtless, to hold wilful treachery a 
hateful sin, than to receive one chapter of Judges as part 
of the inspired word of God. But the scruples of our 
author, once allowed, would uproot our faith in all Scrip- 
ture. Thus, for example, Rahab lied flatly to the king of 
Jericho. But St. James pronounces her to be justified by 
this very act, therefore the Epistle of St. James is not 
inspired. St. Paul commends her by the same proof, 
therefore the Epistle to the Hebrews must be rejected. 
Jehu is praised for destroying the house of Ahab, and 
yet it plainly appears that self-interest was his chief 
motive, therefore we must expunge the Second Book of 
Kings. And thus, when the talisman is broken, and the 
smoke of this one error is let loose, it soon expands 



108 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

into an enormous monster, a giant enemy of the truth of 
God. 

The answer in all such cases is easy and simple. Where 
mixed actions are recorded, God, in His wisdom, may 
sometimes see fit to record His blessing on them for the 
good, or His judgment and curse for what is evil. Uzzah, 
no doubt, had a pious wish to preserve the ark of God, 
but in the manner there was rashness and haste. The 
word of God marks this only, and the hand of God 
visited him in judgment. In Jael there was a breach of 
confidence to a stranger, but genuine zeal for the cause 
of God and of Israel against one who had long been a 
fierce and cruel oppressor. The words of the song dwell 
on her act in the latter aspect alone. Lot committed a 
hateful incest. Yet St. Peter says of ■ him only : " That 
righteous man . . . vexed his righteous soul with their 
unlawful misdeeds." It is strange that Coleridge should 
overlook a principle so simple and natural, which removes 
nearly the whole of the difficulty he thinks insurmountable. 

As to the alleged Grecisms of Daniel, the charge seems 
to have been abandoned, even by advanced Neologists, 
since Coleridge wrote. When we have scarcely any 
Chaldee of that age remaining, the pretension to say 
that a particular phrase is not Chaldee is no slight pre- 
sumption. Coleridge, doubtless, borrowed here on trust 
from some less scrupulous writer. 

P. 56 (83). "As the general warmth to the informing 
light, even so is the predisposing Spirit to the revealing 
Word." 

There is in this paragraph much that is beautiful and 



coleeidge's confessions. 109 

true. But when reviewed in connexion with the main 
argument, it suggests some difficult inquiries. All truth 
cannot justly be expected to be received at once. There 
is an order to be observed in its reception, and a lawful 
condescension to ignorance or prejudice in its publication. 
The great truths of the Gospel might still be true, and 
even have been preserved in the world, if no New Testa- 
ment Scriptures had been written. An infidel may be 
reasoned with on this ground : " You have no right to 
reject the great facts and doctrines of Christianity, 
because of supposed errors, on lesser points, in the word 
of God. The evidence of those facts, both historically 
and to the conscience, is clear and strong. But your 
rejection of them must involve three or four premises, 
some false, and all of them to you uncertain ; that the 
supposed errors are real, and not the result of misconcep- 
tion ; that all the Scriptures openly profess to be written 
under plenary and verbal inspiration ; and that the texts, 
which seem to claim this for the whole or particular 
parts, are not among the minor errors. Till you have 
weighed the main doctrines in a reverent spirit, you 
cannot be sure of any of these premises, on which you 
secretly ground your own unbelief. Hence you must be 
inexcusable in rejecting Christianity for such reasons." 

The Apostle sometimes speaks " after the manner of 
men;" and so may we also, when the occasion requires it, 
without any sacrifice of truth. But this accommodation 
to weak faith or strong prejudice by no means requires 
us to resign our own convictions. We must not and 
ought not to believe less ourselves, that others may believe 



110 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

more than they now do. Yet, in reasoning with them, 
we have to keep in mind the right order of thought, and 
not to oppress those with strong meat, who can hardly 
endure and digest even " the sincere milk of the word." 

The passage, however, is rather a development of 
Coleridge's own views than a mere condescension to the 
doubts of a sceptical mind. The subject then becomes 
one of great delicacy. It turns on the difference between 
two kinds of imperfection, that of a fallible penman, or the 
perfect condescension of a Divine message to the wants 
and weakness of those to whom it is sent. Coleridge 
maintains the former ; the latter is the more Scriptural 
view which he condemns. But he forgets how 
much even the latter implies. A revelation to men 
cannot be the same as one to angels. Its perfec- 
tion requires it to be, in one sense, imperfect; as the 
perfection of our Lord's work of redeeming mercy re- 
quired Him to become a man of sorrows. The message 
must stoop to human language, sympathies, and intelli- 
gence. And since every part has its own immediate as 
well as final purpose, such a message to Jews, by a Jewish 
prophet, must have a different tone and character from 
one to Christian believers by an Apostle of Christ. But 
the Divine wisdom may be as really, even when less 
conspicuously exercised, in the form and vehicle as in the 
substance of the message. To vary slightly Coleridge's 
own metaphor, — we read of no thorns or husks on 
the tree of life (Prov. iii. 13. 18), and yet, along with 
the excellence of its fruits, " the leaves of the tree are for 
the healing of the nations " (Rev. xxii. 2) . Let us take 



coleridge's confessions. Ill 

the fruit to denote the inner and spiritual truth, and the 
leaves the outward clothing, the protecting drapery it 
assumes, human in appearance, but also really Divine ; 
and the metaphor he has chosen well describes the true 
doctrine of inspiration. Assuredly the leaves have 
withered, and the fruit itself is left exposed to serious 
injury, when, as in this paragraph, the Bible, in theology, 
is placed on the same level with the works of Lord Bacon 
in physical science. 

P. 57 (83, 84) . " If I should reason thus— but why do 
I say if? — I have reasoned thus with more than the 
serious and well-disposed sceptic, and what was the 
answer ? ' You speak rationally, but seem to forget the 
subject. I have frequently attended meetings of the 
Bible Society, where I have heard speakers of every de- 
nomination, Calvinist and Arminian, Quaker and Metho- 
dist, Dissenting ministers and Clergymen, nay, dignitaries 
of the Established Church; and still I have heard the 
same doctrine, that the Bible was not to be regarded or 
reasoned about in the way that other good books are or 
may be ; that the Bible was different in kind, and stood 
by itself. By some, indeed, this doctrine was implied 
rather than expressed, but yet evidently implied. But 
by far the greater number it was asserted, in the strongest 
and most unqualified words that language could supply. 
What is more, their principal arguments were grounded 
on the position that the Bible throughout was dictated 
by Omniscience, and therefore, in all its parts, infallibly 
true and obligatory ; and that the men whose names are 
prefixed, were, in fact, but as different pens in the hand of 



112 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

one and the same writer, and the words, the words of God 
himself; and that on this account all notes and comments 
were superfluous, nay, presumptuous, a profane mixing" 
of human with Divine, the notions of fallible creatures 
with the Oracles of Infallibility; as if God's meaning 
could be so clearly or fitly expressed in man's as in God's 
own words ! But how often you yourself must have 
heard that same language from the pulpit ! ' What could 
I reply to this ? I could neither deny the fact, nor evade 
the conclusion that such is at present the popular belief." 

A true doctrine may often be plausibly assailed through 
the errors of its advocates. The shrewd reply of Cole- 
ridge to the sceptic may be retorted on himself : " Surely 
it is beneath you to reject [the doctrine of plenary in- 
spiration], on the score of rash conclusions, which other 
men think fit to include in their idea of it." 

Truth, like the God of truth, must be sought " in due 
order" (1 Chron. xv. 13). The doctrine of plenary in- 
spiration, on a platform of twenty sects, if they are real 
contrasts of creed and doctrine, and not minor diversities 
of discipline only, is too much like a Popish relic set up 
to be worshipped. It is precious when it belongs to the 
living man ; but if saved from the corpse of a decaying 
faith, it becomes little more than an unseemly idol. 
What is the worth of having certain infallible truth in the 
Bible, if no certain truth, or almost none, can be gained 
from it ? But the greater the discord, the lower the amount 
of certain truth actually attained. In such a case, when 
many sects, loud and clamorous in their hostility and 
mutual contradictions, still maintain the plenary in- 



coleeidge's confessions. 113 

spiration of the Bible, it is like a man's coat of mail 
upon a dwarf, burdensome and unnatural. The doc- 
trine becomes grotesque, and almost absurd, when dis- 
severed from a full creed, and constant steady growth 
in Divine knowledge. If it can be retained in a chaos 
of sectarianism, it must be as a lifeless relic. Still it is 
a memorial of better things, and serves to humble those 
who profess to receive it, as being " dwindled sons of little 
men/' A dwarf would be ridiculous in the armour of 
Achilles. The doctrine then reveals its real value, when 
we are seeking truth, and have begun to find and prize 
it in every corner of the Divine word. Our Lord's 
assurance then becomes a strength and guide, that 
"the Scripture cannot be broken," and that "one jot 
or tittle can in no wise pass from the law until all be 
fulfilled." 

How false and imperfect a view of the doctrine it is 
that the sacred writers were merely pens, has been shown 
already. That notes and comments are superfluous and 
presumptuous is another falsehood, a conclusion drawn 
from it without the least real warrant. The perfection 
of Scripture is perfection for a special purpose, and chiefly 
as a record of facts, and a standard of appeal in all matters 
of religious doctrine. Now this really implies the need 
of oral teaching, and also of notes and comments, which 
are only another form of the same ordinance — the ministry 
of the word. The opposite notion, whoever may have 
held it, is false and even absurd. While it affects to 
magnify the Scriptures, it flatly contradicts them. In 
order to exalt them as the only means of attaining truth, 



114 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

it begins by imputing to them direct falsehood, since 
the need and importance of an oral and personal ministry- 
is one of their plainest doctrines. 

The antithesis at the close between man's words and 
God's words is perplexing only at first sight. The ques- 
tion might be answered by another — Can you see best 
by the late twilight or by moonlight ? Surely by the 
latter, though less directly from the sun. One perfection 
of the record, viewed with reference to its special design, 
is its mystery and partial obscurity. It has parts where 
the lamb may wade, and depths where the elephant may 
swim. " It is the glory of God to conceal a thing," and 
the Scriptures are a field in which heavenly treasure is 
hidden. The words of a wise teacher, or thoughtful 
divine, are means appointed for bringing to light, for 
those who require them, the pearls of their deeper mys- 
teries. Among the ends for which they were given are 
these : to awaken curiosity, exercise wisdom, and also to 
manifest Christian love, and the mutual dependence of all 
parts of the mystical body of Christ. 

P. 58 (85). "It cannot but be beneath a wise man to 
be an infidel on the score of what other men think fit to 
include in their Christianity."" 

The remark is pointed and happy. But while it is a for- 
cible reply to such an infidel, it cannot prove that Coleridge 
includes as much as he ought in his view of inspiration. 
His own figure in the next page is a witness against him- 
self. If many a stick, that once seemed to him dry and 
sapless, has become, with riper faith, an Aaron's rod, and 
blossomed with almonds; surely it is safer and wiser, even 



coleridge's confessions. 115 

where still perplexed, to believe that this would be true, 
with still further insight, in the case of the few that still 
seem lifeless, rather than to pare down and lower all the 
statements of God's word as to its own perfection of truth. 
How does he fail to observe that he has cut up the roots 
of his own argument ? For what is his confession ? Once 
many parts of Scripture seemed to be only withered sticks, 
and with the growth of light one after another has 
' ( budded and yielded almonds " To his vision, now grown 
clearer than of old, very few of these dry ones remain. But 
here he turns round sharply upon us, and seems quite posi- 
tive that these few are really lifeless. He will not believe 
that, after his toilsome ascent, even he may have a few 
steps to climb, before he reaches the mountain-top where 
his eyes shall be fully purged " with euphrasy and rue/' 
No, these branches are and must be withered for ever, and 
it is vain for any one to think that these too may blossom 
in their turn. Better do violence to fifty or a hundred 
texts, than imagine that, with still deeper insight, every 
jot and tittle of the Divine word may be found to share 
in the life, which has been found by experience to belong 
very nearly to the whole. Surely the opposite view is not 
only simpler and safer, but nobler and more hopeful, and 
even the most natural inference from the previous steps 
of his own experience. 

P. 59 (86). The real controversy here is not as to the 
right order of the progress, but as to the true end of the 
journey. From an implicit faith in Scripture, the result 
of education, to the clear discernment of Divine truth 
and wisdom in every part, the distance is great, almost 
i 2 



116 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

immense. Still, the first is a help towards attaining the 
last. But then it must not be thrust forward unduly, or 
lifted out of its right place. It is not so much a part of 
the Christian faith itself as a fence and barrier around it. 
When it is held, however blindly, it may not be rashly 
set aside ; but much wisdom may be needed before those 
who hold it can rise into the full manhood of faith. For 
this end the vital doctrines of Scripture need ever to 
be kept in the foreground. When these have been 
inwrought into the soul, there will be a hunger and 
thirst for righteousness, and for that word which is the 
food of heart-righteousness, and thus a deeper sense, daily, 
of its preciousness and power. Its statements respecting 
its own Divine source, instead of causing scruples, will 
then be echoed by a secret instinct of faith. We may 
thank Coleridge for setting his sceptic friends on the right 
road. Our only quarrel with him is when he would 
persuade them to rest satisfied a little more than half- 
way on their spiritual journey, and even turns back a 
little way himself for the pleasure of their company. 

The description of the advance, p. 59 (86), is just and 
beautiful. Doctrines true and useful in themselves may, 
through some misconception, be hurtful for a time, and 
hinder the acceptance of other truths. The Mosaic 
system needed thus to be broken up for the spread of the 
Gospel. And so, in some cases, perhaps, the doctrine of 
plenary inspiration may hinder the progress of a restless, 
earnest inquirer, struggling upwards to the light. It 
may be useful, hypothetically, to lay it aside, and trace 
out truth with earnest freedom, as if the Scriptures were 



coleridge's confessions. 117 

honest, but not wholly inspired records. But as the 
Gospel will issue in the " receiving of Israel/' which will 
even be "life from the dead;" so that very inquiry, 
pursued to its close, must lead to the recovery of the 
truth that had been laid aside for a time, with a Shechinah 
bathing it in glory. Read in the light of superstition, 
or of a naturalizing theology, the doctrine of inspiration 
may be like the mortal body, a drag on the spirit within. 
But read in the light of mature faith, it becomes a resur- 
rection body, a beautiful garment in which the truth will 
stand arrayed for ever. 

P. 60 (87). It would be heathenish love to a friend 
to prize his bodily presence to such a degree as to main- 
tain that without a body his soul would be a mere breath 
and perish. And it is a spurious honour to that revealed 
word of God, whose essence and inner life is the Gospel, 
to affirm that with no Scripture fully and verbally in- 
spired, there could have been no Christian Revelation. 
But still the picture of Coleridge is slightly overdrawn. 
When we trace the actual course of Christianity, while 
attended by this inspired record, we may well affirm that 
its pilgrimage in such a world as ours, as a bodiless appa- 
rition, would have been full of peril ; and it would have 
required no common miracle of love and wisdom to keep 
it from utter extinction and death. The candlestick of the 
Church would have burned very dimly, perhaps have been 
quenched in darkness, if these two olive-trees of God had 
not continually supplied their sacred oil to feed and sus- 
tain the light. 

The statement about the quod semper maxim* is far too 



118 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

strong. Apply it to the Church visible, as it has been 
applied to the Scriptures, and almost nothing will be left 
for us to believe. The maxim is one of the most foolish 
ever devised, unless we expound it so loosely that it ceases 
to be a maxim at all. Coleridge may perhaps only mean 
that in every age there has been a body of sound divines 
who, amidst minor varieties of thought, have held strongly 
all the great truths of our religion, and that we may, by 
a steady and patient eye, trace this stream of truth from 
age to age, so that even in the absence of Scripture, we 
might thus obtain all the knowledge needful to our sal- 
vation. This is an important truth, and tends to clear 
our reverence for Scripture from that superstitious perver- 
sion, in which we are ready to slay living prophets, and 
then to garnish their sepulchres. For what can be a 
closer parallel, than to treat as hopeless the attainment 
of any certainty, what truths are really taught in the Bible, 
and to praise it in the same breath as pure truth with- 
out mixture of error ? Thus, in a practical sense, we slay 
and extinguish the living truth, and then adorn the 
sepulchre, because of the lifeless corpse of truth that lies 
buried within. 

P. 6 (187 f ) . " What you find therein coincident with 
your own pre-established convictions, you will of course 
recognize as the revealed word." 

If the sceptic friend, through the help of the new 
theory, learns to receive only what coincides with his 
"pre-established convictions/" he will have received a 
very doubtful benefit. Here is the peril of this lax theo- 
logy, that it submits the Scripture to the judgment of 



coleridge's confessions. • 119 

the sinner's dim-sighted reason, instead of " bringing' 
every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ/' 

P. 61 (188). "Thenceforward your doubts will be con- 
fined to such parts or passages of the received Canon, as 
seem to you irreconcilable with known truths, and at 
variance with the tests given in the Scriptures them- 
selves/' &c. 

The words " as seem to you/' give here a very wide 
latitude. They are, however, much limited by the clauses 
that follow, assuming only that the further examination 
is carried on in an honest and reverent spirit. It is no 
proof of a strong faith, never to have felt doubts, or seen 
difficulties. The real error of Coleridge's remark, and of 
the whole work, lies perhaps in this point. Because a 
credulous and superstitious spirit may gulp down at 
once, in words, the doctrine of plenary and verbal inspi- 
ration, without pausing one moment to dwell on its 
manifold and weighty consequences, or really believing 
even the first letters of the Christian faith, he confounds an 
advancing, but still very imperfect stage of progress in 
the apprehension of Divine truth, and of the wisdom of 
Scripture, with the right creed and final attainment of the 
Christian believer. The closing sentences may be adopted 
with one important substitution : " The result will be, 
a confidence in the deep wisdom of the revealing Spirit 
of God, increased only by the apparent exceptions." The 
fact is clear, that some passages of Scripture, taken alone, 
are very open to perversion ; just as in the best and noblest 
music, some bars or passages, taken alone, may contain a 
frightful discord. One reason for this is doubtless what 



120 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

Coleridge here suggests under a beautiful figure, when 
he speaks of those who would "rend the Urim and 
Thummim from the breastplate of judgment, and frame 
oracles by private divination from each letter of each dis- 
jointed gem/' The Spirit of God would constrain us to 
study the whole word of God, and to study it with a 
practical aim and in a reverent spirit. To the Jews that 
one saying of our Lord, "Destroy this temple,"" &c, 
might well be as great a stumbling-block, as the blessings 
of Deborah or the cursings of David to men like Cole- 
ridge, whose piety is more benevolent than profound. 
Yet these very words strengthened the faith of the true 
disciples, who were prepared to believe that every word 
of their Lord must be wise and true. All Scripture needs 
to be expounded according to " the analogy of faith." 
If persons will rend it asunder, and "frame oracles by 
divination from each letter of each disjointed gem," it 
may be one proof of the perfection of the inspired word, 
that it is so formed as to frustrate and disappoint the pro- 
fane attempt. It is given " 7ro\i;/xe/3a)? kol iroXvrpoirax;" 
in order that it may quicken spiritual diligence ; and its 
truths will open to us with deeper interest, and with in- 
tenser power, when we see in them not only the gift of 
God, but the blessed fruit and gracious recompense of 
our own assiduous and patient inquiry. 

Let. V. p. 63 (89). "Yes, my dear friend, it is my 
conviction, that in all ordinary cases the knowledge and 
belief of the Christian Religion should precede the study 
of the Hebrew Canon." 

It does so in the case of those whose views you 



Coleridge's confessions. 121 

condemn. I never heard of the most thorough " Bible 
Christian/'' who would set a child to study the Canon 
as its first lesson of Christian instruction. The practical 
contrast is not at all such as your words imply. But 
is it not better that a child should be set at once to 
"learn and inwardly digest'" the true sayings of God, 
without being taught or encouraged to suspect, from the 
first, that some of them may prove to be only " false 
sayings of men?'''' An explicit and mature faith in the 
inspiration of every book of Scripture, and of every part, 
as we have it now, could only be the fruit of persevering 
thought and study, and of Christian knowledge in its 
ripeness and perfection. But an implicit faith, such as 
Christian children usually gain from pious parents, though 
widely different from the other, is a vast negative gain. 
It saves countless distractions in the acquisition of 
Divine truth, and shuts the door, at least for a time, 
against many heresies and delusions. Still it can hardly 
pass into the other and higher kind of faith, by a spiritual 
resurrection, without a season of death. In thoughtful 
minds there will usually be a stage of inquiry, when the 
truth, first obtained through implicit faith in Scripture, 
having ripened in the conscience, becomes in its turn a 
test for the Scriptures themselves ; just as light may be 
used to test the healthiness or disease of the human eye, 
though it is only by means of the eye that the light has 
been discerned. The features of this middle stage may 
vary widely, according to the relative intensity of feeling, 
or fulness of truth previously attained. Where a few 
main truths only have been learned, but these are held 



122 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

vividly, the effect will be as in these ' ' Confessions." Along 
with the full reception and hearty love of those truths, 
there may be a readiness to discard parts of Scripture, 
because the range of truth accepted is not full or wide 
enough to secure a just appreciation of the whole. There 
may then be strong Christian faith in the citadel of the 
soul, but scepticism may lodge in its battlements, or 
lurk in its outskirts. In other cases, the range of truth 
apprehended may be wider, but the apprehension of each 
part be very feeble. The transition may then reveal no 
such symptoms of partial incredulity, but too often will 
be imperfect. Faith in the Scriptures, though for- 
mally more complete, may really be more defective and 
impure, through want of that intense life of truth in the 
soul, which alone can blend all parts of the Divine 
message into their true moral harmony. No part will be 
rejected ; but many errors, alien from the spirit of the 
word of God, may keep an undisturbed lodgment in the 
soul. 

The healthiest form, perhaps, of the transition, is mid- 
way between these. It is when the implicit faith of the 
child in the word of God, as one complete whole, is never 
abandoned ; but when, also, there is such energy of faith 
in its central truths, as will not rest content while any 
moral contradiction of them even seems to be sheltered 
under an authority so holy and divine. Difficulties will 
then be examined, one by one, as they arise, with firm 
faith that a solution does exist ; but also with a settled 
purpose not to speak deceitfully for God, and rather to 
pause and confess our own ignorance than offer explana- 



coleridge's confessions. 123 

tions which find no response in the conscience and heart, 
and run counter to the true laws of Divine morality. 
Those who blame strongly the partial scepticism in minds 
of the first class, will often do well to ask whether it is 
not the feeble hold they have themselves on every part 
of God's truth, which spares them the perplexities almost 
inseparable from a faith, limited in its range, but vigo- 
rous and deep within those limits. The word of God 
is one vast problem to the thoughtful believer. Those 
who have never felt any thing perplexing in its message 
can never have grasped its main truths in all their 
living power. And those, again, who are content to 
explain its difficulties by contradicting its own outlines 
of faith, or maxims of goodness, are really further from 
the ripeness of Christian wisdom than some of those 
whose partial laxity they condemn, and perhaps are less 
likely to discover their own defect. But still each alike 
is a defect, and a dishonour to the revealing Spirit of 
God. 

" To make the Bible, apart from the truths, doctrines, 
and spiritual experiences contained therein, one subject 
of a special article of faith, I hold an unnecessary and 
useless abstraction."" 

True, the Bible, " apart from the truths contained in 
it." But not " the Bible, in connexion with one great 
truth it contains/' namely, that " all Scripture is given 
by inspiration of God," and that " one jot or tittle shall 
not pass from the law till all be fulfilled." 

a Who shall dare," it is asked, " to dissolve or loosen 
this holy bond, this Divine reciprocity of faith and 



124 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

Scripture? Who shall dare enjoin aught else as an 
object of saving faith, besides the truths that appertain 
to salvation ? " But this truth does appertain to salva- 
tion, though not in the first, yet in the second order. 
It is not well to exalt it into the first place, as an essen- 
tial of Christian faith. But neither is it wise or safe to 
thrust it below its real place, as the main shield to that 
faith against the inroads of delusion, the phial wherein 
is treasured the one Divine test, whereby we are to dis- 
cern truth from error, and light from darkness. 

" The imposers take on them a heavy responsibility, 
however defensible the opinion itself, as an opinion, may 
be." 

Here Coleridge seems to adopt the Popish conceit about 
truth de fide, and not de fide. But it is rotten at the 
core. Faith, saving faith, is not the acceptance of one 
or two, or ten or twelve truths, specially, to the neglect 
of all others. It is a habit of mind which may be de- 
scribed as " a welcoming of God's truth into the soul."" 
The degrees of truth proposed may vary widely, and still 
there may be saving faith. On the other hand, the rejec- - 
tion of any truth of God is an act of unbelief ; and so far 
as its influence extends, dims and blights the faith in all 
the rest, because it reverses that habit of soul in which 
faith has its life and essence. An opinion, as an opinion, 
is worth little or nothing. It may increase the prudence 
of the outward actions, but can add nothing to the life 
of the soul. Truth must be fully and cordially embraced, 
and then it becomes spirit and life. No mere opinion is 
or can be harmless. If false, it is pernicious from its 



Coleridge's confessions. 125 

falsehood ; if true, it is harmful, because it is an opinion 
merely, and not a firm and solid faith. In either case it 
implies a sin of infirmity, and a token that the soul is 
not yet " filled with the fulness of God." A measure of 
this infirmity is unavoidable in the progress of the soul's 
redemption from perfect ignorance and moral blindness 
to the perfect knowledge of the pure in heart, who see 
God. But to be willing that a truth should be held as 
an opinion, if only it be nothing more than an opinion, is 
a fatal error, destructive of real progress, and of all deep 
reverence for truth as truth. 

Two questions are very distinct — What we ought to 
believe, as established Christians ? and in what order 
should truth be presented to perplexed and sceptical 
minds ? Remarks may be most true and wise, in refer- 
ence to the second question, and perilously false when 
applied to the first. Besides, no management can avoid 
the real difficulty. The texts where the Scriptures speak 
of themselves, that is, the later of the earlier, as the 
word of God, are so numerous and plain, that the sceptic 
cannot and will not fail to observe them. We ought 
not, indeed, to set difficulties too early before him. 
But still less should we make them insurmountable when 
they arise, and betray the cause of revealed truth, by 
owning that they are real, and not apparent only. Our 
answer ought rather to assume the following hypothetical 
form : — ' ' Assuming for a moment/' we may say, " that 
the sixty-two books are in every part a revelation from 
the Infinitely Wise to a world of sinners, given at 
intervals through two thousand years, and designed for 



126 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

every age, nation, and character, revealing alike the 
events of past and future ages, the plainest lessons of 
duty, and deepest mysteries of Providence, is it natural, 
possible, or reasonable, that they should not contain many 
things which, at first sight, are difficult and hard to under- 
stand ? Could they proceed from the God of Nature, 
or the God of Providence, if all were clear, easy, and 
consistent, at the first glance, to worms of the earth, to 
children of the dust ? " 

Let. VI. p. 67 (92). 

To assume that any view is held merely to avert certain 
consequences, is really to assume that it is not held sin- 
cerely, and that its advocates do not believe in its truth. 
Now to maintain the full inspiration of the Scriptures, if 
we do not really believe it, would be profane and wicked. 
The attempt to exclude heresies by lying and hypocrisy, 
would be a sure way to introduce and multiply them. 
But while every truth ought to be held on its own direct 
evidence, the evil results of an error are a lawful motive 
for deepening our aversion. The contrast in this case 
may be overstated. If we are to believe that all Scrip- 
ture is inspired, and still are encouraged to think every 
creed that has ever pretended to be derived from it 
equally plausible, we are little forwarder than if we are 
left free to discard any portion at our pleasure. The real 
difference is that, so long as the doctrine of plenary in- 
spiration is held, it needs a more violent strain on the 
conscience for serious heresies to find entrance. And the 
practical result is most serious; for, however little Cole- 
ridge may reject, the same principle of a purely subjec- 



coleridge's confessions. 127 

tive test will warrant others in rejecting' much, and an 
immoral infidel in casting aside nearly the whole. For 
what is the principle? The varying degree of moral 
attainment in each Christian is to be the test by which 
he decides how much is, and how much is not, Divine. 
Coleridge may receive nearly all, but others, following 
the same elastic rule, might reject nearly all. And this 
kind of selection tends also to nourish intellectual pride, 
both in what is received, and what is rejected. In one 
we find a proof of our spiritual attainments, and in the 
other of our superior judgment, compared with those 
unhappy Bibliolaters who receive all on trust. This is 
neither healthy nor safe, and must lead to countless evils. 
The antithesis that follows, p. 68 (93), like many 
others, is deceptive. It is really this — Are we to receive 
the Bible from its external evidence, or from the moral ? 
The true answer is, From neither alone, but from both 
combined. To receive it wholly from external evidence 
leads to a blind, dark superstition, which mistakes sha- 
dows due to its own darkness for the hues and colours of 
the Divine message. Receive it only for its moral evi- 
dence, and your own conscience sits in judgment, as a 
superior, on the words and messages of the living God. 
The diseased palate is made the test of the medicine 
designed for its own cure. The proud heart tries, by 
its own pride, the precepts of humility ; the pigmy 
reason, by its own littleness, the plans and counsels of 
the All-wise. The evils of an opposite extreme do not 
prove that such a course is not also full of peril, and 
fraught with evil. 



128 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

Neither alternative here offered is a safe and wise 
course, but one equally distinct from both. Three or 
four truths need to be successively applied. First, the 
Bible, in its plainest truths and general character, com- 
mends itself to the conscience as good, holy, and gra- 
cious ; and therefore contains, either purely or impurely 
presented, a real revelation (morally) of truth. Secondly, 
it comes to us with external evidence, clear as to the 
main portions, that it is a supernatural revelation, or at 
least contains and records messages from God. Thirdly, 
the Bible affirms its own inspired character, and one 
part of it bears witness to another that the Spirit of 
God is its true and secret Author. Finally, all analogy 
leads us to suppose that a message so various, from the 
God of all wisdom to sinful creatures, must contain some 
things hard to be understood, and perhaps harder to 
receive. To copy Coleridge's Pentad, perhaps rather 
curious and fantastic in its form, the Prothesis is, sub- 
stantial goodness in the Scriptures, truth that commends 
itself to the conscience of men. The Thesis is the exter- 
nal evidence that such books are a part of the Canon ; 
and the Antithesis, the external evidence of Nature and 
Providence to the presence of mystery and difficulties in 
all things truly Divine. The Mesothesis is the witness 
of the Scriptures, each to other, and one to all, that they 
are the word of God. The Synthesis is the plenary 
inspiration of the whole. The other parts, robbed of the 
Prothesis, lead to midnight superstition ; and the Pro- 
thesis, stripped of the rest, would leave us floating in the 
mists of Neology. From the union of all there will spring 



Coleridge's confessions. 129 

a faith, hearty and intelligent, reverent and discriminat- 
ing; while implicit reverence to the whole transforms 
itself daily into reverence and love for every part, when it 
has been found to be life and spirit to the whole being. 
But it must be most pernicious to make the fallen con- 
science the sole judge whether every part answers or not 
to our conceptions of a perfect Divine message. There 
is a Decretal which reads : " The Books of the Old and 
New Testament are to be received, because there seems 
to be a decree of holy Pope Innocent (i. e., the founder 
of the Inquisition) in their favour ! " Is it not a close 
parallel to say, Such and such parts of them are to be 
received, because there seems to be a decretal of that 
holy pope, my own conscience, in its favour ? To receive 
them, in short, without any reference to their moral 
features, is superstition ; but to make our moral sense, 
the healing of which is one main object of them, the 
sufficient test of any part, is presumptuous madness. 

P. 68 (93), note, "It is remarkable that both par- 
ties might appeal to the same text, 2 Tim. iii. 16," 
&c. 

Both might appeal to the text, but one appeal would 
be truth, the other little better than open folly. For, 
first, there is no difference of reading, or none worth 
notice. Not one manuscript in Griesbach or Bengel 
omits the copula, and the versions are often a slight 
paraphrase, and no presumption for a different reading. 
And next, the received text really admits of only one 
sense. For the word ypa<j)r] is never used in the New 
Testament for a writing in the abstract, but always for 

K 



130 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

a passage of Holy Writ. In fifty cases not one excep- 
tion is found. And not only the usage, but common 
sense requires the same version. What could be more 
unmeaning than to say, All those parts of the Canon which 
God has inspired are also profitable ? Further, not only 
common sense, but the context, enforces the same con- 
clusion. The writings of the Canon have already been 
styled collectively, ra lepa ypafifiara, the holy writings. 
These Timothy had known from his childhood, and not 
merely some vague extracts, or " genuine fragments " 
mingled with uninspired rubbish, but the Old Testament 
as known to the Jews. Having already called the whole 
lepa ypdfi/jbara, the Apostle changes the term, and asserts 
that iraaa ypacfrr), that is, every text or part of those 
sacred writings, is inspired of God. This reasoning 
seems decisive. Because jpafifiara is a general term, 
St. Paul adds an epithet to confine it to the Scriptures. 
But the other term, in the idiom of the New Testament, 
of itself denotes the Scriptures only. He employs it, 
then, in its known meaning ; and by the prefix, iraaa, 
affirms that every passage of those holy writings, 
known to Timothy, is inspired, and because inspired, 
profitable also. 

The second class of versions quoted are merely ambi- 
guous, and admit the true sense just as naturally as the 
other. To be a witness for Coleridge's view, the Vulgate 
should have been, " Qusecunque Scriptura divinitus est 
inspirata, etiam utilis est." The version of Calmet re- 
quires the sense of our own translators, and the article 
excludes the other. Tertullian's words strongly favour 



coleeidge's confessions. 131 

the same view, " Legimus omnem Scripturam, sedifica- 
tioni habilem, Divinitus inspirari."" Origen's, though 
slightly ambiguous, are more naturally construed in the 
same way. The external and internal evidence is equally 
decisive for the rendering of our common version, and 
the tone of every quotation in St. PauFs Epistles fully 
proves it to be the true meaning of the Apostle. 

Pp. 69 — 71 (94 — 96). "In every generation, and 
wherever the light of Revelation has shone, men of all 
ranks, conditions, and states of mind have found in this 
volume a correspondent for every movement towards the 
Better felt in their own hearts. The needy soul has 
found supply, the feeble a help, the sorrowful a comfort ; 
yea, be the recipiency the least that can consist with 
moral life, there is an answering grace ready to enter. The 
Bible has been found a spiritual world, spiritual, and at the 
same time outward and common to all. You in one place, 
I in another, all men somewhere, and at some time, 
meet with an assurance that the hopes and fears, the 
thoughts and yearnings that proceed from, or tend to, 
a right spirit in us, are not dreams, nor voices heard in 
sleep, or spectres which the eye suffers but not perceives. 
As if on some dark night a pilgrim, suddenly beholding 
a bright star moving before him, should stop in fear and 
perplexity. But lo ! traveller after traveller passes by him, 
and each being questioned whither he is going, makes 
answer, c I am following yon guiding star/ The pil- 
grim quickens his steps, and presses onward in confidence. 
More confident still will he be, if by the wayside he 
should find, here and there, ancient monuments, each 
k 2 



132 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

with its notice lamp, and on each the name of some 
former pilgrim, and a record that there he had begun to 
follow the benignant star. 

"No otherwise is it with the varied contents of the 
sacred volume. The hungry have found food, the 
thirsty a living spring, the feeble a staff, and the vic- 
torious ever purer songs of welcome and strains of 
music; and as long as each man asks on account of 
his wants, and asks what he wants, no man will discover 
aught amiss or deficient in the many-chambered store- 
house. But if, instead of this, an idler or a scoffer 
should wander through the ruins, peering and peeping, 
either detects, or fancies he has detected, here a rusted 
sword or pointless staff, there a tool of rude construction, 
and superseded by later improvements, and preserved, 
perhaps, to make us more grateful for them ; which of 
two things will a sober-minded man, who from his child- 
hood upward had been fed, clothed, armed, and furnished 
with the means of instruction from this very magazine, 
think the fitter plan ? Will he insist that the rust is 
not rust, or a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on 
the steel for some mysterious virtue, and that the staff 
and astrolabe of a slippered astronomer are identical 
with the quadrant and telescope of Newton or Herschel ? 
Or will he not rather give the curious inquisitor the joy 
of his mighty discoveries, and the credit of them for his 
reward ? " 

All here is beautiful, while Coleridge dwells with bright 
eloquence on the excellence of the Divine Word. The 
truth sparkles with life, when it flows from the heart's 



coleeidge's confessions. 133 

fountains, which that word has purified by its heavenly 
power. Where then does weakness enter, and tame 
down admiration and honour into lame and timorous 
defence ? " If an idler or scoffer, peering and prying, 
either detects, or fancies that he has detected, rusted 
sword, or pointless shaft/' &c. The two alternatives are 
not the same. Reality and erring fancy may be wide 
as the poles asunder. Why prefer the fancies of a peer- 
ing scoffer to the eye of that great Architect who pro- 
vided the ample storehouse, and taught you to use its 
stores, and who assures you that one purpose of it is to 
cure your dimness of vision, and to anoint your eyes with 
eye-salve, that you may see wondrous things in the word 
of God ? Whatever your dim eyes, or the dimmer eyes 
of the scoffer, may think they see, "all Scripture is 
inspired of God, and profitable/'' If we receive the 
witness of men, nay, even of scoffers and sceptics, 
surely " the witness of God is greater/' and ' ' this is 
the witness of God, which He has testified" of the 
excellence of the written word. 

" Will he insist that rust is not rust ? " Metaphors 
are not argument. Even when employed in a wrong 
cause, they are deserters which the voice of Truth can 
summon back to her own standard. Since our Lord 
opened the eyes of the blind man with spittle and 
clay, who shall assure us that what the scoffer tf fancies " 
to be rust, even were it such really, being found in 
these God-inspired Scriptures, has no Divine and healing 
virtue? The humble means employed in that miracle 
were surely the parable of a wider truth. Parts of the 



134 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

Divine message,, in appearance trivial, useless, or un- 
worthy, may yet, when received in faith, be found to 
be endued with healing" and enlightening* power. 

P. 73. "A few parts may be discovered of less 
costly materials, or inferior workmanship " 

It is no true inference from the inspiration of all 
Scripture, that every truth it reveals, and every part of 
the revelation, is equally important. Scripture itself 
teaches just the reverse. As there are ranks and orders 
of dignity among the holy angels, why not also among 
heaven-derived truths ? Some faithful sayings the 
Holy Spirit has expressly singled out as of primary worth. 
The tabernacle was all made after a celestial pattern, but 
some of its materials were " less costly " than others, 
and probably some parts of less finished workmanship. 
Still every part answered to a Divine pattern. In a 
revelation to men, the pure and heavenly truth must 
stoop down to us, and why not stoop lower in some 
parts than in others ? There is a wide difference between 
the Books of Nehemiah and of Revelation, and still both 
may be entirely divine. 

The whole paragraph, as an appeal to the sceptic, is 
beautiful and true. It is a cumulative argument from 
the experience of ages. The inquiry, however, is not 
into the best mode of dealing with an infidel, but what 
ought to be our own faith as Christians. And here the 
nature of the contrast is entirely changed. One question 
is of this kind : Ought a few minor difficulties, and even 
errors, granting them to be such, to outweigh the nume- 
rous proofs of moral excellence and spiritual power in 



coleridge's confessions. 135 

the Scriptures, viewed as a whole, when these have been 
attested by the experience of the wisest and best of men 
in so many ages of the world ? In the latter case, the 
question is this : Ought difficulties few and small, which 
have diminished confessedly with every step in the growth 
of spiritual light, to outweigh the many full declarations, 
that all Scripture, or each part in its turn, is the inspired 
word of God, on the truth of which we may safely rely ? 
Is it more reasonable to assume that our last step has 
brought us to the perfection of spiritual insight, or that 
the words of St. Paul, and of our Lord himself, are unre- 
servedly true ? Stripped of metaphors, this is the one 
real question, and it is amazing that such a mind as 
Coleridge can strive laboriously to make his readers 
accept the former alternative, and to dismiss the last as 
a vain superstition. 

The questions that follow, p. 73, are a direct disproof 
of the alarming results which Coleridge assigns to the 
doctrine he condemns. For if the maxim of expounding 
separate parts by the spirit of the whole leads to the 
same practical conclusion, it must be folly to renounce 
the usual faith of the Church, and contradict St. Paul, 
on the ground of the ill consequences that else must 
follow. 

But the practical conclusion is not the same. For 
while the sound maxim of interpreting individual parts 
by the spirit of the whole will secure us from a super- 
stitious perversion of particular texts, the maxim that 
some parts, distinguishable by no outward sign from the 
rest, are uninspired, sets us free to follow our own fan- 



186 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

cies whenever we please, instead of the word of God. 
On one principle we have a double safeguard against 
error, the letter of the text, and the spirit of the context, 
or the analogy of all Scripture. On the other we have 
no check whatever. The moment a passage displeases 
our taste, or crosses our theory, we have only to pronounce 
it " rust/' or " a pointless shaft " — froth thrown up by 
the fermentation of life in its lower stages, an accommo- 
dation, a tradition, an apologue, a fancy, or an anachron- 
ism, or that prophecy is " pretended history/' in fact, 
whatever device we please, and the difficulty is at an 
end. We are left free to be unbelievers by piecemeal, 
and it is well if we, or perhaps our children, do not end 
by becoming infidels complete. 

We may trace the effects of this elastic principle by 
earnests supplied to us even in the present day. Cole- 
ridge accounts the history of the Fall a mere allegory. 
Niebuhr and some of his followers describe the early 
Books of Genesis and Exodus as myths, like the Roman 
legends out of which he has sought to extract real his- 
tory. The Books from Joshua to Chronicles are of course 
taken as uninspired, except some prophetic messages in 
them. Again, the Song of Deborah, the Book of Job, 
Esther, Canticles, the Book of Daniel, except " perhaps 
a few genuine fragments/' are excluded by Coleridge, 
Arnold, Pye Smith, from the inspired Canon. In the 
New Testament, if no book is wholly and absolutely 
excluded, still between accommodations, Jewish fancies, 
anachronisms, trivial errors, reasonings based solely on 
prejudice and popular opinion, there will be little left of 



coleribge's confessions. 137 

solid footing. Facilis descensus Avemi. When once we 
have sacrificed the literal truth of repeated sayings of 
God to the fancied infallibility of our own discernment, 
it is impossible to say where the mischief will end. The 
soundness of Coleridge in many great matters only 
makes it more grievous that he should throw the weight 
of his authority into the scale, which, to thousands, may 
lead on in its descent to the worst delusions, and even 
to spiritual death. 

Pp. 74, 75 (98—100). "To assert and to demand 
miracles without necessity was the vice of the un- 
believing Jews of old, and from the Rabbis and the 
Talmudists the infection has spread. . . . But all the 
miracles which the legends of monk and rabbi contain 
can scarcely be put in competition, on the score of 
complication, inexplicableness, the absence of all intel- 
ligible use or purpose, and of wanton self-frustration, 
with those that must be assumed by the maintainers of 
this doctrine, in order to give effect to the series of 
miracles by which all the nominal composers of the 
Hebrew nation before the time of Ezra, of whom there 
are any remains, were successively transformed into 
automaton compositors, so that the original text should 
be, in sentiment, image, word, syntax, and composition, 
an exact impression of the Divine copy ! In common 
consistency the theologians who impose this belief on 
their fellow-Christians ought to insist equally on the 
superhuman origin and authority of the Masora/'' 

This passage and what follows is more like superficial 
railing than solid argument. The doctrine itself is 



138 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

strangely misstated and travestied. No one of sense 
and piety believes that Isaiah, David, or St. Paul, was 
a mere automaton in writing the Holy Scriptures. 
They were tyepofjuevoi virb Trvevfjuaro^ aylov, " borne 
along by the Holy Ghost ;" so that while they had full 
sympathy with the message, and their understanding 
was in full exercise, as conscious agents and ministers 
of the word, they were under a power which guided 
their thoughts and directed their words, so as to secure 
a record of Divine truth suited for every age. 

But the miracle is "complicated." So is every 
miracle whatever,- — God, man, and nature all conspire 
in it. It was very complicated, when God said to 
Moses, " Stretch out thy rod over the sea/'' and Moses 
stretched it out, the east wind blew, and the waters 
became a wall on the right hand and on the left. No 
motion of a rod would naturally cause an east wind, no 
east wind naturally make the waters like a wall, or 
" congeal " the depths in the midst of the seas. There 
was the voice of God, the action of Moses, the motion 
of his rod, the blast of the east wind, the congealing 
of the waters. How complicated the process ! how 
simple and sublime the result ! The body is one com- 
plication, the soul is another, and the union of both 
more complicated and more wonderful still ! Why 
darken counsel by an objection which one glance at 
the human body ought to prove worthless ? 

But it is " inexplicable/'' What then ? " Canst thou 
by searching find out God ? " So far, however, as it is 
useful to understand it, it may be readily explained and 



coleeidge's confessions. 139 

illustrated, and the words of 2 Pet. i. 21 are a sufficient 
key to any simple mind. 

It is charged, next, with " absence of all use and 
purpose." Of no use, in a world of error and darkness, 
to have a sure guide, a message of truth without error, 
to be a light to our feet amidst snares and pitfalls ! The 
voice of ten thousand believers in the first ages, and of 
tens of thousands in the present day, condemns and 
disproves the assertion. What privilege higher than to 
have access to a fountain of pure unmingled truth? 
an oracle, living oracles, where God speaks to us in 
every variety of tone, from gentle whispers, suited to the 
ear of children, to that voice of many waters and mighty 
thunderings, before which archangels are silent with 
awe, and tremble and adore ! 

What follows is mere trifling. God has told us 
that "all Scripture is inspired/'' and that it "cannot 
be broken/'' And the reply is, We cannot believe this, 
unless inspired versions are provided us in every 
language, or unless others undertake to believe this 
without warrant. 

P. 75 (100). "But I am weary of discussing a tenet 
which the generality of divines, and the leaders of the 
religious public have ceased to defend, and yet continue 
to assert or imply. The tendency manifested in this 
conduct, the spirit in which not indeed the tenet itself, 
but the obstinate adherence to it against the clearest 
light of reason and experience, is grounded, that it is 
which, according to my conviction, gives venom to the 
error, and justifies the attempt to substitute a juster 



140 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

view. As long as it was the common and effective belief 
of all the Reformed Churches, that by the good Spirit 
were the spirits tried, and that the light which beams 
forth from the written word was its own evidence for 
the children of light; as long as Christians considered 
their Bible as a plenteous entertainment, where every 
guest, duly called and attired, found the food needful 
and fitting for him, and where each, beholding all around 
him glad and satisfied, praised the banquet, and thank- 
fully glorified the Master of the feast ; so long did the 
tenet that the Scriptures were written under the special 
impulse of the Holy Ghost remain safe and profitable. 
Nay, in the sense and- with the feelings in which it 
was asserted, it was a truth, a truth to which every 
spiritual believer now and at all times will bear witness 
by virtue of his own experience. . . . And if they did 
not always duly distinguish the inspiration, the im- 
breathment of the pre-disposing and assisting Spirit 
from the revelation of the informing word, it was at 
worst a harmless hyperbole. It was holden by all that 
if the power of the Spirit from without furnished the 
text, the grace of the same Spirit from within must 
supply the comment." 

The works of Gaussen and Hengstenberg, which ap- 
peared almost as soon as the " Confessions/'' and many 
others which have been written since, show the first 
sentence to be palpably untrue. I, too, am weary of 
replying to such empty declamation as Coleridge de- 
scends into in the previous paragraph. Here he ven- 
tures to say of the doctrine of plenary inspiration, as 



Coleridge's confessions. 141 

held by the great body of the Fathers and the Reformed 
Divines, that it is against " the clearest light of reason/' 
The clearest light ! rather the sparks self-kindled by 
human pride (Isa. 1. 2), with which all who compass 
themselves lie down in sorrow. When reason rejects 
the true sayings of God, it degenerates rapidly into 
thick moral darkness. Nothing can well be more un- 
reasonable than the assumption on which the whole 
argument or invective rests. It is that the last step 
he has reached, when difficulties have melted away in 
every previous stage, is the pinnacle of wisdom ; and 
that no further light would remove the few doubts or 
perplexities that remain, even though earlier progress has 
removed so many. And this, almost the height of un- 
reasonableness, is here styled "the clearest light of 
reason." 

The contrast that follows is hardly less strange. Does 
Coleridge, of all persons, mean to teach us that a great 
error may, for a time, be safe and profitable ? Yet what 
else can he mean when he says, safe and profitable, nay, 
even a truth ? If the doctrine was safe and profitable, it 
must have been true. If true then, it must be true now, 
unless we hold the bright idea that the Scriptures were 
inspired throughout three centuries ago, and that the 
scepticism of the last century has dis-inspired them ! 
Without faith in the central truths of Scripture, no doubt 
faith in the hedge, the periphery, that is, their plenary 
inspiration, will profit very little. It will then be a 
superstition, a truth held in unrighteousness, and rather 
a tax on the reason than a strength and joy to the heart. 



142 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

But which view is likely to be more correct — one held, 
as with the great Reformers, amidst the sunshine of 
faith ? or one held by those who, like Coleridge, have 
emerged slowly, and with difficulty, out of the low fogs 
of Socinianism and Neology engendered in a sceptical 
age ? 

The contrast here drawn, and again p. 88, is not 
Scriptural nor just — that all supernatural revelation is 
from the Word or Son of Grod, and all ordinary grace 
and influence from the Holy Spirit. The antithesis is 
altogether baseless and unsound. For all supernatural 
revelation is not only by the Word, but through the 
Spirit. It was so in our Lord himself (Isa. lxi. 1. Lev. 
iv. 17 — 21), and in the Jewish prophets (Zech. vii. 12. 
2 Pet. i. 21). In the New Testament, also, the mira- 
culous gifts, the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge 
and prophecy , were "by the same Spirit" (1 Cor. xii. 8. 
10). It was so too in the latest and fullest prophecy, the 
Book of Revelation (ch. i. 1. 10 ; xiv. 13 ; xvii. 3). Again, 
all ordinary grace is from Christ the Word, by the opera- 
tion of the Spirit. Nay, the fullest statement of this truth 
is linked, not only with the person of Christ, but this 
very title— the Word (John i. 14. 16, 17). But while 
the contrast, as stated by Coleridge, is untrue, there is a 
true contrast, held by Christians in general, between 
regenerating and enlightening grace common to all 
Christians, and special or supernatural inspiration. Here 
there is, and is commonly held to be, a difference in kind. 
The difference is not in kind, but in manner and degree, 
between prophetic inspiration by voice, dream, and vision, 



Coleridge's confessions. 143 

and the Apostolic, by the mighty inward working of the 
Spirit of God, the Spirit of heavenly wisdom. 

P. 81 (104— 106). "All men of learning . . . are not 
to be credited." 

As an appeal to the infidel, all this paragraph is just 
and true. But as an implicit assumption that there are 
real disproofs of plenary inspiration, it is baseless. " See 
how the logic will look." David is recorded to have 
treated cruelly the people of Rabbah. Therefore the 
record is uninspired ; for either it is not true, or else if the 
fact occurred, an inspired record would have concealed it. 
Three large round numbers in Chronicles are so large as 
to cause some doubt of their historical accuracy. There- 
fore the fault, if there be a fault, cannot be due to later 
copyists, though such numbers, 400,000 and 800,000, 
are of all things the most open to the entrance of such 
error. Or, again, our Lord refers His disciples to Daniel 
the prophet in explanation of his own prophecy. There- 
fore the book they ascribe to him, which contains the 
passage our Lord quoted, is a forgery of late origin. Or 
again, the Jews even now celebrate the feast of Purim, 
therefore the history of the event they celebrate is an 
eastern legend. This logic does not seem one whit 
better than that which Coleridge ridicules. 

The testimony, p. 84 (107), "This I believe," &c, 
coming from such a mind, is weighty and important. 
But the better his own state and the further his progress, 
the greater the inconsistency of his creed. He has 
groped his way from the midnight of his early days, and 
finds himself, by morning light, within a stone's throw 



144 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

of a city " with glistening spires and pinnacles adorned/' 
lit up in every part with the beams of the Sun of 
Righteousness. But having approached so near, he is 
confident he has reached the true end of his journey , and 
losing patience to travel a few steps further, contends 
that the city has been built out of its place, too far to 
the north. The doctrine of inspiration, as taught by 
the consenting voice of Prophets and Apostles, must be 
lowered to suit the difficulties, not of the Archangel before 
the throne, but of the poor way-worn " wrestler with the 
Spirit till the break of day." It must be cast into this 
new and singular form : — " The Scriptures are inspired, 
not throughout, but in many parts, and perhaps in all ex- 
cept those in which Coleridge finds difficulty at sixty years 
of age, and not earlier in life ! " Viewed intellectually, 
no position can be more untenable than that in which 
Coleridge would land his disciples, when they compare 
such frank admissions of his own progress with the 
main drift of these " Confessions. " 

The Seventh Letter is an argument against plenary 
inspiration from the spirit of servile fear and bondage to 
the letter, in which it has often been maintained. It may 
be answered almost in Coleridge's own words : " Surely 
it behoves you to inquire whether you cannot be a be- 
liever in the inspiration of l all Scripture ' on your own 
faith. It must be beneath a wise man to disbelieve it 
on the ground of the superstitious way in which it is 
held by those who have no solid faith in Christianity 
itself." 

In reality the evils alleged to arise from the doctrine, 



coleeidge's confessions. 145 

when divorced from the vital truths of the Gospel, are no 
real presumption against it. Tear down the temple of 
Divine truth, leave one solitary pillar standing in its 
porch, and offer incense before it, and you may have a 
melancholy superstition, a pitiful idolatry. To renew 
the temple on its original plan, in its first beauty, it may 
possibly be more safe and convenient to remove this 
pillar for a time, but it must be replaced before the 
building can be complete. Till then, it might hinder 
the masons, and be chipped and injured, or broken by 
the scaffolding that must be placed around it. Remove 
it then carefully, not dashing it in pieces, but remem- 
bering it may have, ere long, to be replaced, and then 
build freely and fast from the foundation to the top- 
stone. When your building is complete, this pillar will 
find its own place. In other words, be content to suspend 
your faith in the all-inclusive inspiration of the Bible 
for a time, until you can receive it on true grounds. It 
cannot be so clear or so important a truth that every 
verse of Scripture is a word from God himself, as that 
contradictions cannot be true, that God requires a reason- 
able service ; that He is holy, and hates all sin ; that 
He is love, and delights in mercy; and that Jesus is the 
Christ, the Son of God, whose commands you are bound 
to obey, and on whose sacrifice all your hopes are to rest. 
Do not venture to deny that all Scripture is inspired. 
You may not be able to decide fully on so wide a question, 
till first principles have been well mastered. With in- 
creased knowledge, you may yet find your difficulties 
melt away, and that the doctrine only adds to the har- 



146 NOTES ON INSPIRATION. 

monies of revealed truth. But do not let consequences 
from this doctrine, assumed too hastily, perplex your first 
steps in the pursuit of Divine knowledge. Rather believe 
the song of Deborah uninspired, than that the God of 
Christians has pleasure in treachery ; or that the Psalms 
owe their form, in part, to human infirmity in the 
Psalmist, than that God would justify or approve private 
hate and selfish malice. And so of all the rest. But 
remember, it is one thing to suspend your faith in a 
doctrine, once held superstitiously, till you can satisfy 
yourself that it is in harmony with the spirit and scope 
of God's revelation ; and another to reject it, in the face 
of strong and direct testimonies of God's word that seem 
to affirm it, when almost every difficulty has been re- 
moved. 

Such a temporary suspense of faith in plenary inspira- 
tion may be the safer course for an inquiring and scep- 
tical Christian to pursue, who is honest in his inquiry. 
To receive nothing on false grounds, and no truth out 
of its due order, may be the best preparation for a healthy 
and vigorous faith at the last. But we smooth the path- 
way of recovery for hopeful sceptics at far too dear a 
price, when, for their sake, we set aside, or pare down a 
revealed truth, inject doubts and difficulties into the 
life-blood of the Universal Church, and impute error to 
those messages, which the Holy Spirit has caused to be 
written and recorded for our learning by men of God, 
and which He has sealed in every part with the signet of 
heaven. 



THE NATURE AND EFFECTS OF THE 
ATONEMENT. 

Atonement by the sacrifice of Christ is the heart and 
life of Christianity. The Gospel rests upon the truth, 
that " Christ died for our sins, according to the Scrip- 
tures/'' that He " was made a curse for us/'' and " bore 
our sins in His own body on the tree." But a clear appre- 
hension of this great doctrine is a hard and high attain- 
ment, and no slight obscurity rests on it in many minds, 
which desire to hold it with a reasonable faith. Great 
questions arise, to which conflicting answers have been 
given. Did our Lord bear the sins of the saved only, 
or of all mankind ? How far is the transfer of guilt to 
the innocent consistent with the eternal laws of truth 
and righteousness ? Is the substitution total or partial ? 
Does it include all sins, and sin in all aspects, or some 
only? What is the nature of the curse which Christ 
endured ? What are the results of the sacrifice itself, and 
what are those which depend on the faith and repentance 
of the sinner ? Is all punishment of those for whom an 
atonement has been made illegal and unjust ? If Christ 
L % 



148 THE NATUEE AND EFFECTS 

died for all, how is it that it is still " appointed for all 
men once to die V 3 Can the sentence be repealed by 
atonement, and still remain ? 

In the " Ways of God/' chap. vii., I have attempted 
to throw some light on these difficulties. But the 
thoughts there published are too briefly expressed,, and 
liable to misconstruction ; and have been approved by 
some, and condemned by others, on mistaken or insuffi- 
cient grounds. A clearer exposition of them will, I 
trust, be a real help to many perplexed and thoughtful 
minds. Heresy itself is often the natural recoil from 
a distorted and lifeless orthodoxy. The moral govern- 
ment of God can hardly be subject to a worse travesty 
than when lowered to this one claim, that a certain 
amount of suffering must be exacted, it matters not 
from whom, for a certain number or amount of sins. 
The conscience revolts from a view so unworthy of the 
Divine holiness, so alien from the whole tenour of 
Divine revelation. A creed in which there is no sub- 
stitution, and a creed in which there is nothing but sub- 
stitution, depart equally, on opposite sides, from the 
truth of God. Let us try, with modesty and reverence, 
to disentangle, one by one, the difficulties in this part of 
revealed religion. 

I. First, what is the extent of the atonement ? Did 
Christ die for the saved only, or for all mankind ? 

Here the answer of the Bible is plain. There are 
texts where Christ is said to give himself for the 
Church, for His sheep. There are others where, in- 
definitely, He is said to die for many, for sinners, for 



OF THE ATONEMENT. 149 

men unjust. There are none where He is said to die for 
the Church only, for His sheep only. Such alone could 
exclude a wider message, while these agree with it, and 
are included in it, as a part in the whole to which it 
belongs. 

On the other hand, the language of many texts is 
strictly universal. "All we like sheep have gone 
astray ; we have turned every one to his own way ; and 
the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" 
(Isa. liii. 6) . " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh 
away the sin of the world" (John i. 29). "The bread 
I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of 
the world " (vi. 51) . " If one died for all, then all died : 
and he died for all, that they who live should not hence- 
forth live to themselves, but to him that died for them, 
and rose again" (2 Cor. v. ]4, 15). "God was in 
Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (v. 19). 
" That he, by the grace of God, should taste death for 
every man" (Heb. ii. 9). "Who gave himself a ran- 
som for all " (1 Tim. ii. 6) . " And he is the propitia- 
tion for our sins ; and not for ours only, but for the sins 
of the whole world " (1 John ii. 2) . " We have seen, 
and do testify, that the Father sent his Son to be the 
Saviour of the world " (1 John iv. 14) . 

The same truth is implied in the very nature of the 
Gospel. It calls on the sinner to believe what must be 
true before he believes it, and this on the authority of 
God's message, not of some secret hidden revelation 
to himself alone. What he has first to believe is what 
the Corinthians received first of all from the Apostle^ 



150 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

that Jesus Christ died for our sins (1 Cor. xv. 3) . If 
He died for the saved only, then the faith of the sinner, 
when he first hears the Gospel, cannot rest on the 
simple word of God. It must be builded rather on a 
secret persuasion of his own final safety, for which that 
word, as yet, gives him no warrant. None of the signs 
of grace, which it supplies to the believer, can precede, 
but all must follow, the first act by which he believes that 
Christ died for his sins, and rests his hope on that 
atoning sacrifice. 

The Church of England, in full harmony with Scrip- 
ture, announces plainly the same truth, that Christ died 
for all men, and for all their sins. We read it in 
Art. XXXI., in the summary of the Creed, in the Cate- 
chism, and in the Communion doubly — both in the 
prayer of consecration, and in the sublime thanksgiving 
near the close. Thus it meets us in the first and the 
last steps of that ladder of Jacob, by which babes and 
sucklings are promoted into fellowship with the anthems 
and the worship of heaven. 

II. Our Lord Jesus Christ, then, died for all. He 
tasted death for every man. He is the propitiation, not 
for Jews only, nor for believers only, but for the sins of 
the whole world. And now the question must arise, 
Did He die for multitudes wholly in vain ? Can sins 
be atoned for, and the sinner still perish ? Can punish- 
ment be exacted from a Divine substitute, and those be 
punished for whom this costly ransom has been paid? 
If the atonement includes all men, and still all men are 
not saved, but many lost, must we not lower its efficacy, 



OF THE ATONEMENT. 151 

and admit that, in many cases, Christ has died in vain ? 
In what sense, then, can He have borne the sins of the 
whole world ? What are the proper and direct results 
of this atonement? And what are those which flow 
from it, but still depend on that moral change which is 
wrought by the Gospel in the hearts of true penitents 
alone ? 

The answer to these questions must be sought in a 
further truth. Christ bore indeed the sin of the world, 
the collective guilt of all mankind. A truth how 
strangely solemn, how sublimely glorious ! But all 
sin has two different, almost opposite, characters. In 
one of these it can, in the other it cannot, be transferred. 
It is an act done once for all, which cannot be undone. 
Once committed, it stands engraven on the scheme of 
Providence, a transgression of God's law, a rebellion 
against the Supreme Lawgiver, which needs some public 
vindication of His outraged authority. But it is also 
the act of a conscious agent, the sign of his present 
state, which may be changed or even reversed, but which, 
while it lasts, must make him hateful in the sight of a 
holy God. 

Sin is a debt, and also a disease. It is a transgression 
of the Divine law, without and above the sinner. It is 
a transgression, also, against the health and life of the 
spirit within. Each view of it is equally Scriptural, 
equally important. The debt needs a ransom, the disease 
a cure. If sin were only a disease, there would be much 
room for sympathy, none for substitution. Atonement 
and propitiation would be wholly out of place. Our 



15£ THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

only want would be the healing, soothing power of some 
attractive pattern of perfect love. If sin were only a 
debt, substitution would be a complete Gospel, and all 
for whom an atonement was made would be heirs of 
salvation, because of that substitution alone. Those for 
whom Christ died would then be saved, even before they 
believe. Their debt once paid, no punishment or loss 
could reach them any more. Again, those who are not 
saved, on this view, must have had no sacrifice provided, 
no glad tidings sent. The Gospel, if preached to them 
at all, would be only a falsehood, a snare, and a delusion. 
They would be wholly beyond the redemption of Christ, 
like the fallen angels. The Saviour would neither have 
lived nor died for them, and to invite them to believe 
this would be simply persuading them to believe a lie. 

These two aspects of sin, outwardly towards the law 
of God, and inwardly as the present sign of a state of 
heart displeasing to God, and ruinous to the soul's health, 
have an opposite relation to the doctrine of repentance. 
An act once done cannot be undone. No repentance 
can wipe out the stain, or reverse the record of rebellion. 
But sinful acts cease to be the index of a sinful heart, 
when the heart itself is changed by true repentance. 
The sinner then dies to the sin, and the sin itself expires, 
in its character of a moral test. Thus the disease of sin 
needs to be healed by an inward work in the heart, and 
not by substitution. The debt may be borne and paid 
by a substitute, but can never be done away by repent- 
ance alone. So also, in actual life, a workman, disabled 
by grievous illness for his work, may contract a debt he 



OP THE ATONEMENT. 153 

cannot pay. He now suffers under a double burden — a 
debt unpaid, and a disease uncured. A physician might 
cure the complaint, but the debt would remain. A 
benefactor might pay the debt for him, and still the 
disease be unhealed. It is only a double gift, a payment 
and a cure, which can restore him to a state of freedom, 
health, and peace. And these two benefits might be 
linked with each other. If there is a medicine that 
can heal, and the sick man, through ignorance or 
prejudice, should refuse to apply it, he might be de- 
graded into a helpless and worthless pauper, a mere 
drain on wasted benevolence, by help unwisely given. 
A wise benefactor might then make his promise to pay 
the debt already due to depend on proof of willingness 
to consult the physician, and use the prescribed re- 
medies. The medicine would not pay the debt, nor the 
payment heal the disease; and still the payment and 
the first step in the cure would be linked inseparably in 
one work of love. 

These two distinct aspects of all sin, when we look 
below the surface, enter into the whole economy of re- 
demption, and even serve to define the very form of 
Divine revelation. It consists of two distinct parts, the 
Law and the Gospel, the Old Covenant and the New. 
Again, the law may be viewed in a double light, either 
as the earnest and preparation for the Gospel, containing 
ail the germs of the later message, or else as its antithesis 
and contrast. The former aspect of the law is unfolded 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the latter, mainly, 
in those to the Galatians and the Romans. 



154 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

What, then, is the nature of this contrast, which 
determines the whole structure of the word of God ? The 
Law exhibits a perfect standard, and exacts a penalty for 
every failure. The Gospel assumes the moral bankruptcy 
of those to whom it is given, and provides a ransom for 
their guilt, and healing medicine for their moral and 
spiritual sickness. One deals with man as a creature, 
sets before him the rule of perfection, and severs all 
creatures into the unfallen and the fallen, the sinless and 
the sinful. The other deals with men as fallen creatures, 
sets before them a way of recovery, and severs them into 
the impenitent and the penitent, the faithless and the 
believing, those who still turn their backs upon the God 
of grace, and those who seek Him diligently, to regain 
His lost image in righteousness and true holiness. And 
thus the Law, as law, makes no provision for repentance. 
Its message is simple and solemn. " The soul that 
sinneth, it shall die." " Cursed is every one that con- 
tinueth not in all things written in the book of the law, 
to do them."" But it also recognizes the truth, that sin, 
though repentance cannot undo it, may be transferred 
from the sinner, and be the object of a Divinely-provided 
atonement. The Gospel reveals a true and Divine atone- 
ment, as the basis on which it wholly rests. But its 
own message, from the first, is a call to repentance, and 
a promise of forgiveness, adoption, and every blessing, 
to the penitent alone. It is the voice of the Law, that 
sin is a debt, a moral bankruptcy, a just exposure to 
death and the curse, which no mere repentance can do 
away, and which it needs a sin-offering to remove ; and 



OF THE ATONEMENT. 155 

also that human help is vain, since " no man can redeem 
his brother, or give unto God a ransom for him/'' It is 
the voice of the Gospel, that a Divine atonement has 
been made, that Christ is "the Lamb of God, who 
taketh away the sin of the world ;" and that an inward, 
personal change of heart, a present acceptance of God's 
mercy, a genuine faith in Christ, is the needful moral 
condition, that the disease of sin may be healed, and 
the sinner may be restored to the favour of God in this 
life, and the full enjoyment of His glorious presence in 
the life to come. The Law deals thus with all sin ob- 
jectively, in reference to the strict claims of Divine 
justice, and the rights of the Supreme Lawgiver. The 
Gospel, first of all, reveals this claim as already satisfied 
by the death of Christ alone ; and then deals with sin sub- 
jectively, in the actual rebellion of the heart, and brings 
the power of the Cross, and the energy of the quickening 
Spirit, to bear on these strongholds of the kingdom of 
darkness in the hearts of sinful men. 

III. What, then, apart from the Atonement, is the state 
of mankind before God ? What is their legal standing, 
and the nature of the curse and sentence under which 
they lie ? 

The Law of God is the standard of right and moral 
perfection. Its claim is unalterable, and cannot be 
lowered : perfect love to God, and love to man, and the 
actions that flow from perfect love. This is God's 
righteous claim, and, whenever it is not satisfied, the soul 
is morally bankrupt. Sin once committed, debt once 
incurred, can never be cancelled by later obedience. 



156 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

That obedience is already due, and its absence would be 
a new debt added to the old. Thus, when sin has once 
entered, the Law, as law, provides no remedy. Its pro- 
mise is to the sinless alone. To the sinful it denounces 
God's sentence — " The soul that sinneth, it shall die." 

The sentence of the broken law is death. But what 
is the meaning of this death, the curse denounced by 
the law on every transgressor ? It needs some care and 
thought to answer this question aright. The death 
meant must be the same which was threatened in Para- 
dise, and which entered the world through Adam's sin. 
Again, it is a contrast to the second death, the final 
sentence of the last judgment. When one is inflicted, 
the other is abolished. " And death and hell were cast 
into the lake of fire " (Rev. xx. 14) . It is not the mere act 
of dying. In all Scripture it is ascribed to the soul, even 
when separated from the body. " In death there is no 
remembrance of thee ; and who will give thee thanks 
in the pit?" The words temporal and eternal, often 
applied to death, tend rather to mislead, than to 
explain the true nature of this contrast. The first death 
is temporal, because its future abolition is a revealed 
promise ; but in its own nature, apart from Christ's re- 
demption, it would be everlasting. Neither the faculties • 
of the creature, nor the nature of sin, nor the justice of 
God, assign it any limit or bound. It is due to a 
mighty work of redemption alone, that it is swallowed 
up in eternal victory. 

This death, the sentence of the law, extends to the 
whole man, both soul and body. To see its nature as 



OE THE ATONEMENT. 157 

respects the soul, we must reflect on its work with re- 
ference to the body. One is the visible sign and sacra- 
ment of the other. . The body is then parted from the 
soul, its life ; and being thus parted, becomes the prey 
of inward corruption. So, also, death is the separation 
of the soul from God, the true source of life ; and all the 
confusion, chaos, and moral corruption and dissolution 
which follows that awful separation. Without, there is 
banishment from the presence of God, and from all the 
light of His favour and blessing. Within, there will follow 
the unrestrained working of moral corruption, degrading, 
perverting, desecrating all the faculties and powers of 
the immortal spirit. Sin would thus become, under the 
name of death, a " finished " evil, its own ever-growing 
torment, and the soul sink deeper and deeper in an 
abyss of hopeless misery. 

On this view we may see the force of the contrasted 
figures, by which the first and second death are portrayed. 
One is " the lake of fire/'' solemn indeed and most awful, 
yet bounded in its range, shut in by firm land on every 
side. The other is " the deep/'' the abyss, " the bottomless 
pit," evil reigning, rioting, growing, deepening without 
limit and without end, in its fatal descent, farther and 
farther, from light, happiness, and heaven. By the 
sentence of the law, fulfilled without atonement or 
redemption, mankind, once fallen, would be shut out 
from God's presence, and sink and sink, and sink for 
ever, in this abyss of hopeless and endless ruin. There 
would have been, through ages without end, the awful 
reality of a God-dishonouring, God-hating, God-bias- 



158 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

pheming, self-tormenting, God-abandoned universe. 
Such death is the wages of sin, its due desert, and the 
issue to which it naturally tends. It is the fatal harvest 
from the seeds of moral corruption harboured in the soul. 
" Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death/'' 

IV. What, now, is the nature of Christ's Atonement ? 
What is the curse He endured for sin ? What is the 
direct and proper result of that Atonement, apart from 
the mighty moral change, in all who obey the Gospel, 
wrought by the magnetic, transforming power of the 
Cross of Christ ? 

Here the testimony of Scripture is plain. u The Lord 
hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." " He made 
Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin." " Christ hath re- 
deemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse 
for us." " He suffered for our sins, the just for the un- 
just." " Who himself bore our sins in his own body on 
the tree." " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh 
away the sin of the world." A sinful character was never 
once ascribed to our Lord. He was, and was ever held 
to be, in the midst of His sufferings, the Holy One of 
God, who might not see corruption, the Lamb of God 
without blemish or spot, who " knew no sin." Sin was 
ascribed or imputed to Him, not as the sign of a sinful 
character, but in direct contrast to the claims of a 
character declared to be free from all spot or stain of 
sin. It was in its other aspect, as a series of acts done, 
that could not be reversed, of transgressions against the 
authority of the Supreme Lawgiver, that the sin of the 
world, one vast collective whole, was laid, like the wood of 



OF THE ATONEMENT. 159 

the sacrifice, upon the shoulders of the world's Redeemer. 
And the curse which He bore was death, the first death, 
so far as it was due to the demerit of sin and the claims 
of Divine justice alone, and was not aggravated by the 
further working of moral corruption in the heart of God- 
abandoned sinners. 

When God reveals His justice in dealing with the 
moral character of men, He must deal with them accord- 
ing to the truth. The Holy One, who loved righteous- 
ness and hated iniquity, whose life was sinless, and whose 
love is perfect, must then be anointed with the oil of 
gladness above His fellows. But when He deals with 
sin in its other aspect, as transgression of the law, re- 
versible by no repentance, the perfection of the Victim 
on whom the guilt is laid, and from whom the penalty 
is exacted, serves only to place in the clearest light the 
essential sinfulness and hatefulness of sin, and the autho- 
rity of that law which the sinner has despised. The 
claim of God's holiness is ill explained by a law of 
mechanical compensation, as if the sufferings, for a few 
days and nights, of an Infinite Person, were exactly equal 
to those of the multitudes of mankind through a whole 
eternity of ruin and sorrow. Sin and its punishment are 
not such finite, measurable things. What is needed for 
the full vindication of God's authority is that His holy 
anger against all sin, as sin, should, once for all, be 
displayed to the uttermost, before any soul that has fallen 
from God, and rebelled against Him, can be restored to 
the perfect enjoyment of His favour and blessing. This 
is the baptism of fire, of which our Lord said, " How 



160 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

am I straitened, till it be accomplished ! " He endured 
for our sakes that death which is the curse of the broken 
law, and in His case its sting was not removed. He cried 
upon the cross, " My God, my God, why hast thou for- 
saken me ? " He suffered the pains, the pangs of death. 
He was laid " in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps/'' 
and was vexed with all the storms and waves of God's 
holy displeasure against the sin of a guilty world. The 
Highest and the Holiest stooped to the lowest abasement 
of shame and sorrow. He endured death, the sentence 
of the law, in all its darkest terrors, so far as these are 
separable from the aggravations caused by reigning sin, 
gloomy remorse, fierce, untamed passion, deep self-tor- 
ment, and utter despair. 

When once this claim of Divine justice against sin, 
as sin, had thus been fully satisfied, and the Holy One 
had descended to the deep of Sheol, enduring the bitter 
anguish of sojourn in the dark land of death, then the fur- 
ther claim of the same justice, that all shall be dealt with 
according to their true moral character, began forthwith 
to assert its unchangeable authority. The pains of death 
were loosed, because it was not possible that the Sinless 
One should be holden thereby. No sooner had He en- 
tered the deep, fathomed its dark abyss, and endured the 
worst extreme of separation from His Heavenly Father, 
than the curse exhausted its bitterness, and the blessing 
began to reveal its power. That same day He left the 
deep of Sheol or Hades, and entered its Paradise, the 
sheltered resting-place of the faithful dead. The third 
day He left the under- world of the dead, and rose victo- 






OF THE ATONEMENT. 161 

rious from the grave, to die no more. The fortieth day 
He completed His upward return, and "journeyed into 
heaven, angels, and authorities, and powers being made 
subject unto him." Because He had stooped unutter- 
ably low, He was raised unutterably high, " far above all 
principality, and power, and might, and every name 
that is named, not only in this world, but in the world 
to come." 

The direct and immediate result of this great atone- 
ment answers to its character, as thus denned, and is 
clearly pointed out in the word of God. The world is 
now reconciled to God. Rom. xi. 15. £ Cor. v. 19. The 
veil of the law's condemnation, spread over the face of 
all nations, is taken away and destroyed. Isa. xxv. 7. No 
amount of past sin is now any barrier to the instant 
restoration of the sinner to God's favour and blessing. 
The middle wall of partition, which no bitter repentance 
could remove, is broken down, and there is free and 
instant access for every returning penitent to the house 
and home of love, from which their sins had banished 
them. There is left no hindrance, no barrier without, on 
the part of Divine justice, administering a perfect Law ; 
but only the hindrance within, from the present unbelief 
and pride of those who will not accept a Divine remedy, 
and who resist and cast aside the grace of the Gospel. 
The curse and condemnation of the Law is done away 
in the cross of Christ. The condemnation of the Gospel 
alone remains. " And this is the condemnation, that 
light is come into the world, and men loved darkness 
rather than light, because their deeds were evil." And 

M 



162 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

thus the effects of Christ's Atonement, common to all 
mankind, are these : the removal of an impassable and 
hopeless barrier between sinful creatures and a holy God ; 
the provision of a day of grace, in which mercy may be 
found ; rich forbearance and long-suffering towards years 
and ages of abounding sin; the abolition of the first death, 
the wages of sin, which is to be swallowed up in eternal 
victory ; the resurrection of the body ; and the transfer of 
men from the reign of death, and the curse of utter vanity, 
to a state in which God, the God of love and holiness, 
will be for ever glorified — though by some in the height 
of heavenly glory, and by others only in the depth of 
just retribution and eternal shame. 

V. What, in the last place, is the connexion between 
the Atonement and the special benefits obtained by those 
who believe and obey the Gospel ? 

Sin is both a debt and a disease. It is doubly a debt, 
both directly, as a transgression, or series of transgres- 
sions of God's law; and indirectly, as the sign of a 
rebellious state of heart, involving guilt as well as cor- 
ruption before God. The Atonement, in itself, removes 
the debt only, and in its first and simplest aspect alone. 
But the guilt of present rebellion, and the disease of reign- 
ing sin, can be removed only by an inward change of 
heart, the work of the regenerating Spirit of God. Here 
the Atonement avails, not by the mere fact of its accom- 
plishment on the cross, but as a moral magnet, a 
mighty fountain of new and heavenly life to the souls 
of men. The substitution of Christ belongs to His 
sacrificial death alone. But His incarnation, His sinless 



OF THE ATONEMENT. 163 

life, His glorious resurrection and ascension, are all 
equally the source of those gifts which, as the Federal 
Head of mankind, and more especially of the Church, 
He pours down abundantly upon all His people. He 
bore the curse of the Law, that men might not bear it. 
He died, that men might not taste of death in its full 
bitterness, armed with its deadly sting, nor remain under 
its power, but that it might be destroyed for ever. But 
He stooped from heaven, that He might raise us to 
heaven. He obeyed, that we too might obey. He 
humbled himself, that He might make us humble. 
He rose from the dead, that we too might rise. He 
ascended, as our Forerunner, that in due season we also 
might ascend, and sit with Him in heavenly places in 
the world to come. In these aspects of His redeeming 
work, substitution has no place, but federal headship 
alone. The Atonement prepares the way for these 
further benefits. It is the only foundation on which they 
rest. But it does not secure them by the mere fact 
that a full sacrifice has been made. They depend on 
a further work of repentance and faith in the heart of 
the sinner, whereby the soul is engrafted into the 
True Vine, and becomes a living member of the mys- 
tical body of Christ. Till this change is wrought, 
the curse of the Law is removed, but the curse of the 
Gospel remains. " He that believeth not is condemned 
already, because he hath not believed in the name of 
the only begotten Son of God/'' And the disease of 
sin also remains still without a cure. The rebellion is 
even aggravated by the greatness of the mercy which 
m 2 



164 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS 

is still despised, and the rich provision of grace, which 
the soul refuses to receive. But the same Atonement 
which removes the legal curse is the grand instrument, 
appointed by God, and applied and used by the Holy Spirit, 
for working this inward and mighty change in the hearts 
of men. When a rich and kind friend pays a debt for a 
prisoner, the substitution properly belongs to the payment 
only, and its immediate effect is his release from prison. 
But the same friend, when the debtor is released, may receive 
him into his family, provide him with a fresh education, 
and introduce him into a new sphere of life, leading to 
riches, happiness, and honour. The prisoner, condemned 
before to the society of criminals, and sinking fast in 
moral degradation, may come under better and nobler 
influences ; and gratitude for the benefit he has received 
may lead him to copy the moral excellences of the beloved 
benefactor by whom his ransom was paid, and on whom 
all his present comforts and blessings depend. All these 
results are no part of the payment which was first made. 
No law of justice requires that they should exactly equal 
that sacrifice of comfort or ease to which the rich friend 
submitted on his payment of the debt. And yet they 
are so entirely dependent on this first act of love, that, 
in a looser sense, they may be called the purchase of that 
first ransom. In strictness of speech, however, this 
phrase does not apply, and rather tends to obscure the 
true nature and condition of these latter benefits. And 
thus we find in the Scriptures that Christ is never said to 
have bought blessings for His people ; nor are adoption, 
regeneration, holiness, peace, resurrection, ever styled 



OF THE ATONEMENT. 165 

the purchase of His precious blood. It is His people 
themselves who are purchased, bought, redeemed from 
the power of the curse, the bondage of sin, the do- 
minion of Satan ; that being brought out of the prison- 
house, and made once more the freemen of the Lord, they 
may freely receive, with no impediment from Divine 
justice, whatever blessings the free bounty of God the 
Father is pleased to bestow. And yet all these gifts 
and blessings come to them through Christ alone. He 
is the Vine, and they are the branches. He is the Head, 
and they are the members. He is the great Fountain, 
from whom and through whom alone every stream of 
grace must flow down to a sinful world. Spiritual union 
with the risen Saviour is the fixed, unalterable condition 
on which all the blessings of personal salvation must for 
ever depend. The curse of the Law can be removed by 
the Atonement alone, believed or disbelieved. The curse 
of the Gospel, the moral guiltiness of present rebellion, 
the sore sickness and disease of indwelling sin, can be 
removed by repentance and faith alone, and in no other 
way. Here substitution can have no place. Each must 
repent for himself. Each must believe for himself. Each 
for himself must lay hold upon the promises of the new 
covenant. To bear the burdens of others is the law of 
Christ, which finds its highest fulfilment in His atoning 
sacrifice alone. But this work of the Redeemer in our 
stead must . be followed by a work of the Holy Spirit 
within us, in which the spirit of man is a fellow- worker 
with God, before salvation can be ours in the fulness of 



166 THE NATURE AND EFFECTS OF THE ATONEMENT. 

its revealed blessings. And here the further truth 
applies, that u every man shall bear his own burden." 
" He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap cor- 
ruption ; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the 
Spirit reap life everlasting/'' A great work of Divine 
love has been wrought for mankind, once for all, upon 
the cross, whereby the first death has been abolished, and 
will be swallowed up in eternal victory. But a further 
work is needful, wrought by the Spirit of God in every 
contrite heart, through faith in that Divine atonement ; 
that the soul may attain a full salvation, and being freed 
from the power of the second death, may have right to 
the tree of life, and enter in through the gates into the 
celestial city. 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

The doctrine of the Atonement is closely linked with 
the teaching of Scripture concerning" the solemn truth 
of judgment to come. Some remarks on this subject 
have been offered in the previous letters, but they need 
to be further unfolded, that we may gain, if it be pos- 
sible, a clearer and fuller insight into these deep things 
of God. 

A double perplexity presses here upon every thoughtful 
mind. If Christ died for all, how can multitudes for 
whom He died perish in their sins, and be lost for ever ? 
And again, how can a Being of perfect love create vast 
numbers of intelligent creatures, capable of largest 
happiness, with the certain foresight that the result of 
that creation will be their everlasting misery ? Out of 
these two difficulties a further question will arise. What 
is the nature of that death which is abolished by the 
death of Christ, and of that second death which abides 
and endures for ever ? 

The effects of the Atonement are gloriously complete 
in the case of all who believe and obey the Gospel. 
They are translated from darkness to light, from death 



168 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

to life, from the curse of the broken law to the blessing 
of the new covenant, from the shame, sorrow, and misery 
of the Fall to the perfect joy and blessedness of the 
kingdom of God. There are other effects, less complete, but 
no less real, which extend to all mankind. The Apostle 
ascribes to it plainly " the passing over of bygone sins 
in the forbearance of God." Strict justice would imply 
the instant punishment of all transgression. But man- 
kind have been placed, from the first, under an economy 
of rich mercy and long forbearance. The sun has risen 
upon the evil and the good, and rain has been sent upon 
the just and the unjust. Such a time of probation and 
day of grace to all mankind implies a Divine propitia- 
tion. All the countless gifts of God, bestowed on suc- 
cessive generations of fallen sinners for six thousand 
years, can only be explained by the fact that God, from 
the first, had provided for Himself a spotless Lamb, to be 
the sin-offering for the whole world. 

Again, it is a revealed truth and promise of God's 
word, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, both 
of the just and the unjust. And this resurrection, in 
every case, is an effect of the redeeming work of Christ. 
" For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be 
made alive." " For this end Christ both died, and rose, 
and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead 
and the living." It is by virtue of his death for all, 
that all who are in the graves shall hear his voice, and 
come forth to stand before him in judgment. 

But are these the only results of the Atonement in 
the case of those who die in their sins, and reject the 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 169 

offered grace of the Gospel ? Are temporal blessings 
during the day of grace, and the bodily resurrection, 
which issues in solemn judgment, the sole gain, in the 
case of these multitudes of sinners, resulting from the 
anguish and bitter agony of the Son of God ? 

The true answer, I believe it will be found on deeper 
thought, is widely different. The death which Christ 
came to abolish, and will abolish, is far more than the 
dissolution of the body alone. It implies a calamity to 
the soul, in separation from God, answering to mortality 
and corruption in the body, when it is parted from the 
soul, and becomes a lifeless and loathsome carcase. It 
means the abandonment of the spirit, driven out from 
God's presence, to the unchecked, unbounded, unabated 
consequences of its own inward corruption and wicked- 
ness. " Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death/'' 
Those ideas, which many connect with the doom of the 
lost, of ever-during, self-tormenting wickedness, un- 
restrained by the hand of God, belong rather to that 
death, which is God's last enemy, and which Christ has 
come to destroy and abolish for ever. This is the dark 
mysterious power of the abyss, that bottomless pit, in 
which new and strange forms of rebellion and blasphemy 
have their secret birth, darkening the bright sunshine 
and the free air of heaven. And it is the common boon 
which the Atonement secures to all mankind, the saved 
and the unsaved alike, that this awful, mighty enemy of 
God and man, the sum of all possible evil and misery in 
a God-forsaken universe, is destroyed, abolished, and 
done away for ever. 



170 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

The second death is solemn and terrible. It is a 
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. 
Is it more terrible and awful than that first death, which 
is the finishing and consummation of sin, and which the 
Redeemer came to destroy ? One is God's minister, the 
other is God's last and mightiest enemy. One is a 
resurrection, the other corruption and darkness without 
end. One is described as a lake, though a lake of fire, 
shut in by Emmanuel's land on every side ; the other is 
the bottomless pit, the deep, the abyss, a depth of evil 
unexhausted, and without redemption inexhaustible. One 
is the state in which the enemies of Christ are made His 
footstool ; the other would be the reign of those enemies, 
in a rival dominion of blasphemy and outer darkness, a 
deep as unsearchable below as the height of heaven above. 
For God " is not the God of the dead, but of the living/' 
and the reign of death would imply the awful fact of an 
empire of evil, rivalling both in extent and continuance 
the dominion of the living God, the God of love. 

It is a deep thought of Plato in his Dialogues, that 
just as the sick man resorts to the physician, so wicked 
men, if they were wise, and knew what was really good, 
would offer themselves up, of their own accord, to undergo 
the punishment which is the only fit medicine for their 
inward disease. This truth will apply even to the last 
act of solemn judgment. Compared with the awful 
wages of sin, left without redemption, of death without 
resurrection, of corruption working ever without re- 
straint, and evil triumphing for ever, and tormenting 
itself for ever, in its own abyss of darkness, even the 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 171 

second death with all its terrors may be, not only in the 
sight of a holy God, but even in the consciousness of the 
lost themselves, an infinite gain. That death and hell 
should be cast into the lake of fire is a work of redemp- 
tion, a triumph of Divine love. The Atonement, then, 
even in its wider effects on all mankind, as well as in 
its special blessings to those who obey the Gospel, may 
procure what in God's sight is an inestimable gain. 
Through his own death our Lord has destroyed the 
reign of him who had the power of death, the devil, and 
abolished that fatal and awful power, God's last enemy, 
which involves the worst and most nn mingled misery of 
the creature, as well as the foulest dishonour to the 
name of the Most High. Alike in the case of the saved 
and the unsaved, the heirs of glory and of shame, the 
Son of God will not have borne the curse and endured 
anguish and agony in vain. The result in each case is 
widely different, but in each it is a triumph of redeeming 
goodness, when in the resurrection of the faithful " death is 
swallowed up in victory/' and when, in the judgment of the 
unfaithful, " death and hell are east into the lake of fire/' 
Let us now inquire with reverence, what light does 
Scripture throw on the nature of the second death. 
Does it really contradict the perfections of the God of 
love? It is a state of punishment and anguish, of 
shame and everlasting contempt. Is it revealed to be 
such pure, unmingled, uncompensated misery, as to 
make God's original gift of being no boon whatever, 
but an infinite evil to all who incur this fearful sentence 
of eternal judgment ? 



172 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

The direct statements of Scripture on the state of lost 
souls are solemn and fearful. We do well to take heed 
how we tamper with God's threatenings, or say or do 
any thing to weaken their voice of warning to the heed- 
less sinner. " Their worm/' our Lord tells us repeatedly, 
" dieth not, and their fire is not quenched/'' They rise 
" to shame and everlasting contempt. - " They " go away 
into everlasting punishment.'''' They are " punished with 
everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord."" 
God is to be feared, because He " is able to destroy both 
body and soul in hell/'' They " suffer the vengeance of 
eternal fire."" They " are tormented in the presence of 
the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb/' and 
" the smoke of the torment goeth up for ever and ever." 
Even the Gospel itself is defined by the Baptist and St. 
Paul, as a message of deliverance from " the wrath to 
come." 

Again, there seem to be no direct statements of Scrip- 
ture, to mitigate, reverse, or explain away these solemn 
warnings. In the Old Testament the doctrine itself had 
hardly begun to be revealed, and hence further light, to 
modify or unfold the warning, could scarcely be given. 
The doom there denounced to sinners, to be turned into 
Hades, belongs to the first death, and is a contrast to 
their resurrection to judgment. This is announced in 
Dan. xii. 2, but even there it is not proclaimed as an 
universal truth. It cannot surprise us that little or no 
direct light should be thrown upon the doctrine, when the 
doctrine itself was hardly revealed. In the New Testa- 
ment, again, no word occurs of direct mitigation, no 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 173 

hint of any close to the judgment,, no sound of comfort, 
which could weaken the solemn effect on the sinner of 
these warnings of God. If such further truths exist, 
they must be derived, not from direct statements of 
Scripture, but from meditation on its revealed truths 
below the surface, and from indirect inference alone. 

On the other hand, this silence of Scripture is no real 
presumption against the presence of a further truth, 
secretly implied in its statements, though not expressly 
and openly revealed. There is a weighty reason for this 
silence, as already shown. Supposing the future state 
of souls unsaved to combine two contrasted elements, 
coexisting for ever, infinite goodness to them as creatures 
of the God of love, and everlasting punishment as rebels 
against a God of holiness, there is a most weighty reason 
why, in this time of probation, the wisdom of God should 
veil the first in silence, and reveal the second alone in 
stern and solemn warning. It is the highest victory of 
perfect love to be willing, for long ages, to endure the 
hard speeches and blasphemies of ungodly sinners, 
rather than disclose that part of God's counsels which 
would convict the blasphemers of ignorance and folly, 
but might also weaken the force of the warnings, by 
which the guilty may be reclaimed from their rebellion, 
and attain the happiness and glory of the ransomed 
children of God. 

If, however, the silence of Scripture may thus be fully 
explained, does it not still supply a powerful motive 
against any attempt to remove the veil ? If some hidden 
aspect of Divine truth, shedding hope and comfort on 



174 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

that dark future, be revealed to a few thoughtful and 
reverent -minds, which desire to see their Father's coun- 
tenance more clearly, as the God of perfect love, beyond 
these dark clouds of the judgment to come, ought they 
not to reverence the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and 
while they rejoice in the treasure they have found, and 
buy the field that conceals it, to hide it still, lest the 
thoughtless and profane should abuse it to their own 
ruin ? 

There is much force in this question. It proves the 
great responsibility involved in any public treatment of 
this doctrine, which strives to pass beyond the surface of 
the Divine warnings. It is no full warrant, in this case, 
for any public utterance, that it is true, and based on the 
deepest truths of God's word, unless it be also truth in 
due season. On the other hand, it is the office of the 
well-instructed scribe to bring out of the treasure-house 
of Scripture new things as well as old. There is a true 
no less than a false development of revealed doctrines, 
which must be ever in progress in the history of the 
Church of Christ. God's truth is a living thing, planted 
in the soil of God's Providence ; and as that Providence 
unfolds from age to age, the truth, because it lives, 
must grow and shoot out fresh branches, that may bear 
fruit to the glory of God. The message of judgment to 
come, though a doctrine, is also a prophecy, and gradual 
expansion is the common law of all prophetic truth. At 
the eventide of the Gospel there is to be added light. In 
the time of the end, "many shall run to and fro, and 
knowledge shall be increased/'' 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 175 

Again, there is a moral sign when a further disclosure 
of God's purposes in coming judgment, if He vouchsafes 
to throw new light upon it, becomes seasonable, and may 
lawfully be made known. When the sense of God's 
universal goodness, derived from His own word, has been 
more widely diffused, and has a firmer hold on the 
general conscience, than the authority of His word itself, 
then the silence, which once deepened the power of His 
warnings, will abate their force. Even serious and earnest 
minds will be tempted to disbelieve those parts of God's 
message, which they cannot reconcile with a truth plainly 
revealed, that His tender mercies are over all His works. 
To maintain a general conviction of the truth of God's 
warnings, it may then be needful to show that these are 
not the whole truth, and that in the case of all men, the 
saved and unsaved alike, in the depth as well as the height, 
it is true that " mercy rejoiceth against judgment." 

Such a state of the Church and the world seems 
now to have come ; so that a further unfolding of 
God's purpose of love towards all men, amidst the 
unreversed and irreversible messages of "the wrath 
to come," may now be, in the fullest sense of the words, 
" meat in due season." In this sense, as well as others, 
it may be that at the close of the mystic times of delay, 
and in the days of the seventh angel, " the mystery of 
God shall be finished, as he hath declared to his ser- 
vants the prophets." Let us endeavour, then, with 
reverence and humility, to glean light from all the 
declarations of Scripture which relate to this solemn 
subject. 



176 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

First of all, the Second Death is not the reign of Satan 
in a kingdom of his own, where he torments his victims 
for ever. 

This view of the state of lost souls is very often set 
forth in popular appeals to the fears of men. But it is 
wholly opposed to the real teaching of the word of God. 
We read in St. John, " For this purpose was the Son of 
God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the 
devil/'' The fire, to which the ungodly are sentenced by 
their judge, is " prepared for the devil and his angels." 
And before their judgment the solemn announcement is 
made, — " The devil that deceived them was cast into the 
lake of fire and brimstone, and shall be tormented day and 
night for ever and ever." The foremost in guilt among all 
the countless rebels will then be foremost in punishment. 
He who is " king over all the children of pride," will be 
crushed, beyond all the proud, under the heaviest load of 
Divine judgment. The head of the old serpent will be 
bruised under the feet of the Seed of the Woman, the 
victorious Redeemer of mankind. No trace of a per- 
mitted reign of this Prince of darkness can be found, 
when once "death and hell" have been "cast into the 
lake of fire." Death is the last enemy to be destroyed. 
All others, Satan included, in their power of active re- 
bellion, must therefore have been first destroyed. This 
Lucifer, son of the morning, once most exalted in blas- 
phemous pride, will then be lowest in shame among those 
vanquished enemies, who are become the footstool of the 
King of kings, and Lord of lords. 

Again, the Last Judgment and the Second Death are 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 177 

one main part in a wise, holy, and perfect work of the 
God of love. 

We read at the close of the Law this striking" procla- 
mation of God's name : " He is the Kock, his work is 
perfect; all his ways are judgment; a God of truth 
and without iniquity, just and right is he."" The 
work of God is perfect. There is no flaw, no error, no 
mistake in the scheme of His universal Providence. On 
the side of the creature there is a vast and awful amount 
of sin, folly, and perverseness ; but in that dominion of 
God, whereby He overcomes evil, there is no defect either 
of wisdom or goodness. "All his ways are judgment/'' 
Though " clouds and darkness are round about him/'' and 
may for a time conceal His goodness from weak or sinful 
eyes, yet "justice and judgment are the habitation of 
his throne."" 

When the prophet was told to go down to the potter's 
house, " the vessel he made of clay was marred in the 
hands of the potter, and he made it again another vessel, 
as it seemed good to the potter to make it"" ( Jer. xviii. 4) . 
But the scheme of Providence is one vast work of God, one 
mighty whole. Once begun, it can never be reversed and 
begun anew. One single flaw would here be irreparable, 
and could never be cured. One unjust or unwise act of the 
God of Providence, like one sin in the perfect obedience 
of Christ, would mar the perfection, and change the 
character, of the whole work. Creation, Providence, 
Redemption, would then become one gigantic and irre- 
trievable failure. But this can never be. " His work 
is perfect/'' The forbearance towards evil, while it lasts 

N 



178 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

and seems to triumph, is a perfect forbearance. The 
victory over evil, when that forbearance is full, must be 
a perfect victory. The issues of judgment, however 
solemn, are such, and must be such, that the All-wise, 
whose understanding is unsearchable, the All-good, whose 
mercies are over all His works, can acquiesce in them 
with a deep complacency and delight. The glory of the 
Lord shall endure for ever, the Lord shall rejoice in His 
works. His delight is eminently "to exercise loving- 
kindness and righteousness in the earth."" 

Now this revealed perfection of the whole work of 
God must shed its light on the mysterious subject of 
the second death. The first death is God's last and 
greatest enemy. It may be borne with for a time, but 
its continuance would be fatal to the dominion and 
glory of the Most High. " God is not the God of the 
dead, but of the living. " And hence the indignant 
sentence, " O death, I will be thy plagues ; O grave, I 
will be thy destruction ! " But the second death proceeds 
directly from the appointment of the Supreme Judge, 
who is perfect alike in wisdom and goodness. However 
terrible, it is the Divine remedy for all that is most 
fearful and appalling of possible and actual evil in a 
fallen and rebellious universe. And thus the God of 
love and holiness can and will acquiesce in it, as one 
main element in His fore-ordained counsel of wisdom 
and goodness. To read in it the continuance of rebellion, 
hatred, and blasphemy, for ever, and deepen its terrors 
by heaping up all kinds of moral horrors, the unchecked 
ravings of fiendish malice, the blasphemous utterances 



OX ETEKXAL JUDGMENT. 179 

of raging despair, is to deny and reverse, so far, the 
revealed object of the work of Christ. " For this purpose 
the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy 
the works of the devil/'' The purpose of His judgment 
cannot be to stereotype and eternize active rebellion 
against God, but to abolish it for evermore. The second 
death, however solemn, completes a perfect work of God, 
the Only Wise, and crowns the victory of His perfect 
goodness over the worst malignity of evil. 

The Doom of the Lost, it is farther revealed, is the 
object of acquiescence and holy contemplation to all the 
unfallen and the redeemed. 

"With the views of hell-torment which have often 
been held, to hide it from the thoughts must be almost 
essential to happiness, in hearts not wholly dead to 
feelings of compassion. The bliss of heaven is then 
conceived to depend, very mainly, in being removed 
far away from sights and sounds unutterably mournful. 
Such, however, is not the revealed description of saints 
and angels in the kingdom of God. Their happiness is 
not made to depend either on their ignorance or their 
forgetfulness of the doom of the lost. This is placed 
among the objects of their ceaseless and solemn con- 
templation. "He shall be tormented with fire and 
brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in 
the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their 
torment ascendeth up for ever and ever." cc And again 
they said Alleluia : and her smoke rose up for ever and 
ever." This acquiescence will not be that of stern, fierce, 
unloving hearts, but of tt the spirits of just men made 
H 2 



180 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

perfect/' and baptized into full sympathy with the 
tears, the compassion, and the agonies of the Son of 
God. That doom, however awful, can scarcely be one 
of unrelieved horror and darkness, which is the 
object of deep complacency and holy adoration to saints 
and angels, free from all selfishness and made perfect in 
love. 

In this day of judgment, also, the honour due even to 
the wicked, as God's creatures, will still be fully re- 
cognized by the Righteous Judge. 

The law of God is the reflection of His own eternal 
righteousness. The life of man is there fenced round, 
like a sword of flame turning every way, with this threat- 
ening, — " Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his 
blood be shed : for in the image of God made he man." 
Many victims of murder have themselves been most 
degraded, guilty, and vile. But God here measures tlie 
sacredness of man's life, not by the debasement sin has 
caused, but by His own original work of creation. " In 
the image of God made he man." This law, the voice 
of His own truth and wisdom, will doubtless apply to 
His own acts of righteous judgment. Even while He 
punishes guilty rebels, He cannot cease to honour in 
them the workmanship of His own hands. And hence 
the same truth re -appears in this very form, in reference 
to God's own visitations of anger : " For I will not 
contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth : for the 
spirit should fail before me, and the souls which I have 



But the law of God supplies a further evidence of the 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 181 

same truth. When the judges of Israel have' been 
charged to justify the righteous and condemn the 
wicked, this further precept is given, that if the wicked 
man is worthy to be punished, he shall be beaten with 
stripes. But a limit is prescribed, with a reason for the 
limitation. " Forty stripes he may give him, and not 
exceed : lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above 
these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem 
vile unto thee. - ''' 

Here a double lesson is taught. Wickedness that 
deserves and requires stripes is not to destroy the sense 
of brotherhood. Even when punished, the wicked man 
is called a brother still. Nay, the punishment is to be 
so measured that his due honour, as a brother, may not 
perish. He who first gave this law is the same in whose 
heart, as the Son of Man, it was written, and who will 
also pronounce the final sentence on the ungodly. The 
stripes, whether few or many, in the great day of account, 
will be inflicted by His sentence alone, Luke xii. 45 — 48. 
The doom, being measured on one side by the deep malig- 
nity of aggravated sin, may be unutterably severe. But 
this law is a pledge to us that the righteous Judge of 
quick and dead w r ill still remember the honour of all men, 
as God's creatures, made at' first in God's image, and 
that link of brotherhood which, through the Wonderful 
grace of the incarnation, has linked Him with every 
sinner of mankind. 

Again, the Last Judgment is the work of God's mercy, 
as well as of His righteousness. This is plainly revealed 
to us in those words of the Psalmist : "Also unto thee, O 



182 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

Lord, belongeth mercy ; for thou renderest to every man 
according to his work/'' 

In the judgment of the righteous, it is easy to explain 
this inspired message of Divine truth. The works re- 
warded are the fruits of the Spirit, and flow from 
redeeming mercy alone. Hence the reward itself must 
be traced back to the same fountain, as in the prayer of 
our Church : " Grant that whosoever is here dedicated 
to Thee by our office and ministry may also be endued 
with heavenly virtues, and everlastingly rewarded through 
Thy mercy, who dost live and govern all things, world 
without end/'' 

When applied, however, in their wider range, to " every 
man/'' to the lost as well as the saved, the sentence con- 
ceals a deeper truth. Can it be true, even of the souls 
that perish, that there is mercy in the sentence which 
dooms them to the lake of fire ? Does not the deep 
thought, which revealed itself more dimly to Plato by 
the light of nature, receive here a direct and full sanction 
from the Spirit of God ? Compared with that unequalled 
and most awful curse of evil being left to work out its 
own terrible issues in the darkness of utter banishment 
from the Divine presence, even the justice of God, in all 
its severity, may be like a medicine to guilty sinners. 
Their doom will be awful, but a world abandoned to its 
own unrestrained and consummate wickedness would be 
more terrible and awful still. The revealed place of 
judgment is a lake, not a sea, an ocean, an abyss of 
fire. In the same hour, the abyss, the bottomless pit, 
boundless in its breadth and depth, the yawning, craving 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 183 

Sheol,that can never be satisfied, is destroyed and abolished 
by the power of the Redeemer. It is mercy to the wicked 
to deny them the fatal power of adding sin to sin for 
ever. It is mercy to keep them, under the mighty hand 
of God, from the power of tormenting each other by the 
ever-growing indulgence of their own fierce and hateful 
passions. It is mercy to force them back, though captive 
and in chains, to the presence of that Infinite Goodness, 
from which their own rebellious hearts would hide them 
still deeper and deeper in delusion and darkness for ever- 
more. 

Again, the Second Death is a resurrection to " shame 
and everlasting contempt/' Dan. xii. 2. It involves 
thus, in its very nature, the mystery of an eternal con- 
trast. Since it is a resurrection, it is a work of redemp- 
tion, a fruit of the great atoning work of the world's 
Redeemer. But it is not simply a work of redemption. 
It is the perpetual, abiding manifestation of the creature's 
shame and moral emptiness, in contrast to the immutable, 
glorious perfection of the God of holiness. It obscures 
the Gospel, and distorts our view of the whole course of 
Providence, when we ascribe a result so solemn to a 
capricious, unaccountable withholding of Divine grace, to 
some defect either of wisdom or goodness in the Most 
High, some deliberate preference of the destruction of 
sinners to their salvation. An oath of the Most High 
shields His name from this dark suspicion of unbelieving 
hearts, which have never fathomed the sinfulness of sin, 
or the stubbornness of evil. But when we refer it for its 
hidden key to the contrast between the Only Good and 



184 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

the creatures of His hand, then we may see how the 
work of redemption can turn what might seem an 
incurable triumph of evil into the crown and seal of its 
own perfect victory. It may be this continual spectacle 
of what the creature is in itself, which maintains the whole 
unfallen and ransomed universe in its only true and safe 
position of dependence on the Fountain of life and love. 
The Israelites were warned before they entered the land 
of promise,, " lest when all thou hast is multiplied; then 
thy heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God " 
(Deut. viii. 14) . When the redemption has been so com- 
plete, in myriads on myriads of ransomed souls, that no 
trace of sin, corruption, or mortality remains, how easily 
might pride creep in once more, and a second and more fatal 
apostasy ensue, if the lessons of the past, fading ever into 
the further distance, were not renewed and deepened by 
the present sight of those in whom is still to be learned 
the creature's lesson of self-emptiness and utter shame. 
That solemn doom, though no choice of the free bounty 
of the Most High, whose love and wisdom have displayed 
themselves to the utmost in warnings to keep the sinner 
from the path of ruin, may yet be the object of His deep 
and holy acquiescence, because in this way alone a 
rescued universe may be upheld for ever in the enjoyment 
of a blessedness based on perfect humility, and therefore 
capable of enlarging* itself without end. It may be thus 
through the work of judgment alone, that the bulwarks 
will be reared of that heavenly city, whose walls are 
Salvation, and her gates are Praise. 

Let us now pass on to the New Testament, and trace 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 185 

the lessons which flow indirectly from the teaching* 
of our Lord and his Apostles on the judgment to 
come. 

First of all, the Second Death is a work of the God of 
truth, abolishing pride and falsehood out of the whole • 
universe. 

The New Testament opens its messages with the his- 
tory of the temptation, the conflict of the Evil One, the 
king of pride, with the meek and lowly Redeemer. And 
the result of the conflict there begun is revealed in the 
maxim, often repeated : — " Whosoever exalteth himself 
shall be abased ; and he that humbleth himself shall be 
exalted/'' 

This great truth has to receive ten thousand thousand 
illustrations. But the first and chief is in the contrasted 
lot of the proud Tempter and the lowly Man of sorrows. 
The Son of God, because He stooped low with wondrous 
humility, is to be crowned with eternal and infinite glory. 
The Adversary, the proud Son of the morning, because 
he said in his heart, I will be like the Most High, shall 
be condemned to the shame and vengeance of eternal 
fire. And thus that fire, prepared for Satan and his 
angels, must be the destruction of guilty pride, become 
consubstantiate with the immortal spirit, and capable of 
being destroyed in no gentler way than by this ever-during 
stroke of Divine judgment. " Them that walk in pride 
he is able to abase. " The created being itself will not 
fail, since it is a gift of God, without repentance, and 
is secretly upheld by the Creator's mighty hand. But 



186 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

the stubbornness of that pride which is no longer separable, 
along with the sinful flesh, as in the day of grace, but 
has its home in the spirit, will encounter something 
firmer and mightier than itself, the inflexible holiness 
of the God of judgment. Proud imaginations, the 
high things which exalt themselves against the know- 
ledge of Christ, are idols of the heart, and these idols God 
will utterly abolish. That last great day will be " against 
every thing that is high and lifted up, and it shall be 
brought low." The rebellious creature will be taught, in 
spite of itself, to take its true and right place at the foot- 
stool of triumphant holiness; and the twin reign of false- 
hood and of pride will cease, under the searching, hum- 
bling, penetrating presence of the God of truth and 
holiness, even that presence which is a consuming fire to 
every form of delusion and rebellious pride. 

Again, the Second Death is a work of the God of 
love, wherein He displays His holy anger against every 
sinner, whose heart and life are marked by reigning 
selfishness, and the utter want of genuine love. 

The revealed ground of the sentence of condemnation 
is given by our Lord himself in these words : " Inasmuch 
as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not 
unto me." It is the absence of the works and fruits 
of love which is made the ground of their fearful doom. 
Thus the excellency of a pure and perfect love is taught 
and confirmed by the severity of the sentence, for which 
the absence of that love is the one cause assigned by the 
Judge himself. It follows that the Judge who pronounces 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 187 

the sentence is perfect in love, and in love even to those 
on whom the sentence falls. The Holy One would else 
be a sharer in the sin, which He is visiting in His creatures 
with the most solemn and severe condemnation. The 
second death, therefore, from the very ground on which 
the sentence of doom is based, implies the highest honour 
given to love, as the crowning grace, and the image of 
the Divine perfection; and also the exercise of such love 
by the Judge himself, even to those against whom He 
denounces wrath for the crime of a selfish and unloving 
heart. It may be a deep mystery how the Divine love 
can possibly reveal itself, where Divine righteousness has 
to be displayed for ever in a sentence of everlasting 
shame and punishment. But if righteousness and grace 
co-exist for ever in the infinite perfections of the Most 
High, their exercise may co-exist for ever in His dealings 
even with those whose guilt requires that righteousness 
should assume the form of irreversible and lasting punish- 
ment. Every stroke of the Avenger is a solemn testi- 
mony to God's anger against selfishness, and His delight 
in pure and perfect love. 

The Resurrection of Judgment, like the Resurrection 
of Life, is one main part of the redeeming work of 
Christ. 

The two main issues of judgment, in the sheep and 
the goats, the righteous and the wicked, however deep 
and solemn the contrast of reward and punishment, have 
one main feature common to both, that they follow on a 
resurrection. And hence the Apostle combines them in 
one common statement, before he marks the contrast 



188 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

between " them that are Christ's " and all others. " For 
since by man came death,, by man came also the resur- 
rection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in 
Christ shall all be made alive. " Just as the first death, 
in every case, comes through the sin of Adam, so the 
life-restoring resurrection is to come, in every case, 
through the power and work of the Second Adam, the 
Lord from heaven. Thus the judgment itself on the 
lost is based on a present work of redemption, which they 
share with the saved; and on a victory over death, 
wrought by Christ, and by the power of His atonement 
and resurrection. Their bodies are first restored completely 
from the ruin of the grave, and the dominion of death, 
so far, is wholly abolished. 

What now is implied in this truth, so plainly and 
fully revealed ? The contrast of state, due to the con- 
trast of faith and unbelief, of personal rebellion or re- 
pentance, during the time of probation, is to abide and 
endure. But those results, which flowed directly from 
the sin of the first Adam, are to be reversed and repealed 
by the grace of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. 
For all mankind there has been a federal ruin, and for 
all mankind there is to be a federal recovery from that 
ruin. The opposite results of personal character are to 
remain and endure ; but the common results of the 
Redeemer's work, who is u the head of every man,-" will 
endure also. The lesson of the Law is thus repeated by 
the Gospel in a deeply mysterious form. The wicked 
will be punished for his wickedness by the righteous 
Judge, but his brotherhood with the Judge will be eter- 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 189 

nally revealed by the resurrection which precedes the 
judgment. " In Christ shall all be made alive/'' But 
in the first death the dissolution of the body, and its 
corruption, was only the type, the sign, and the parable 
of a deeper curse on the immortal spirit, when driven 
out wholly from the presence of Him who is Light and 
Love. This correspondence can hardly cease, when the 
dead are raised by the power of Christ. When death 
and hell are cast into the lake of fire, the soul will no 
longer remain under the curse of utter vanity. It will 
be compelled, by the mighty hand of God, to glorify 
Him even in those fires of penal judgment. To glorify 
the Creator is the great end for which every creature 
was made. And thus to glorify Him in any way, how- 
ever solemn, humbling, and mournful, when compared 
with the utter vanity, darkness, and corruption of that 
death which is God's enemy, may be, nay, must be, even 
to the souls of the lost, a real and infinite gain. 

Again, the love of Christ has a depth, as well as a 
height, that passeth knowledge. Its height will be dis- 
played for ever in the glory bestowed upon the risen 
saints, whom He promotes to sit with Him on His 
throne. Its depth has been revealed, once for all, in His 
own agony and death, when He went down to the deep, 
to darkness, and the lowest pit, for man's redemption. 
But is its manifestation to cease, and not rather, like 
that of the height of His love, to endure for evermore ? 
It is more natural and consistent to believe that the 
depth, like the breadth, and length, and height, will be 
eternally revealed. But this can only be by the mani- 



190 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

festation of love towards the guilty and condemned, 
whose doom is declared to be " shame and everlasting* 
contempt. " To them, Divine love, if displayed at all, 
must assume its strangest and most mysterious form. 
But since it has a depth that passes knowledge, how can 
this be seen but in the perpetual yearnings of a deep and 
true compassion towards those whom the nature of their 
sin, and the truth of God's threatenings, has laid under 
a sentence of irreparable loss, and irreversible punish- 
ment ? When the pride of spirits, once rebellious, has 
been crushed under the fire of Divine wrath, and they are 
conscious that their folly and guilt has lost them a glory 
which can never be regained, and brought them under a 
righteous sentence never to be repealed, how may the 
discovery of the unexhausted grace of the Redeemer, the 
depth of a love which can stoop infinitely low, to encom- 
pass them with Divine compassion, pierce through their 
conscience, and pervade their whole being, amidst their 
sense of deepest shame and loss, with an awful and stu- 
pendous consolation ! Self-destroyed, like Israel, their 
only help can be in a love which is able to reach even to 
the lowest gulf of shame and helpless misery. In this 
way not only the height of the love of Christ to the glo- 
rified, but its depth, in wondrous compassion to the lost, 
may be found to surpass all human or created know- 
ledge. 

The Apostle, again, declares of the living God, that 
" he is the Saviour of all men, specially of them that 
believe/'' This name of God will be most fully and com- 
pletely revealed in the future happiness and glory of 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 191 

believers alone. But He is also "the Saviour of all 
men/'' Can this apply to temporal benefits alone, which 
will wholly cease, and are to be followed by total, absolute 
destruction and ruin ? Can it be satisfied with condi- 
tional benefits, made wholly void through the perverse - 
ness of the sinner ? How will this agree with our Lord's 
reasoning on another Divine title, " the God of Abraham, 
Isaac, and Jacob?" Such a name, He there teaches, 
implies no transient, but an enduring relation. Here, too, 
it would seem that the same law of reasoning must apply. 
Unbelievers are not saved from judgment, from righteous 
punishment, from the second death, from shame and ever- 
lasting contempt, from everlasting fire. Is there any 
sense in which they may still be saved, consistently with 
the inflexible truth of these solemn messages of God ? 
They will be saved from bodily corruption, " for as in 
Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." 
They will be saved from the curse of hopeless vanity, from 
that first death, in which the creature is self-ruined, and 
God himself is not glorified, but for ever blasphemed. 
They will be saved from the abyss, unfathomable and 
unsearchable in its depth and darkness, when " death and 
hell are cast into the lake of fire." Will they not also 
be saved from that utter, hopeless misery, where no ray 
of light or comfort breaks in on the solitude of ever- 
lasting despair ? Will they not be saved, in a strange, 
mysterious sense, when the depth of their unchangeable 
shame and sorrow finds beneath it a still lower depth of 
Divine compassion, and the creature, in its most forlorn 



192 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

estate, is shut in by the vision of surpassing and infinite 
love ? 

A further light seems to dawn on this mysterious sub- 
ject, when we trace its connexion with the moral attri- 
butes and perfections of the Most High. 

Every child of man is related to God under three suc- 
cessive forms of Divine goodness. The first is the simple 
bounty of the Creator. The second is the equity of the 
moral Governor of the world. The third is the mercy 
and compassion of the Saviour and Redeemer. These 
answer to the outer court, the holy place, and the most 
holy, of the temple of God. The Lord is good to all, 
His tender mercies are over all His works. He giveth 
to all men life and breath, and all things. He is also 
the God who loveth righteousness, and hateth iniquity. 
He resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble. 
He is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look 
upon iniquity. He is also a God of infinite compassion 
and grace. He reclaims the lost, restores the wanderer, 
welcomes the returning prodigal, and entreats with 
tender compassion all those who have erred and gone 
astray. 

The second character of God, as the righteous Governor, 
is that on which the issues of judgment depend. Man- 
kind are parted into two great classes, according to their 
moral character, their use or abuse of offered grace in the 
day of probation and forbearance. " Then shall ye re- 
turn, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, 
between him that serveth God and him that serveth 



ON ETEENAL JUDGMENT. 193 

him not/'' Personal righteousness, in one class, and 
personal unrighteousness in the other, is the revealed 
ground of the eternal contrast and separation ; but the 
righteousness of the just, though real, is wholly the 
fruit of Divine grace, and because it is grace, which 
" reigns through righteousness/'' their salvation is due 
to God alone. 

But this wide contrast between the saved and the lost, 
in their relation to God's judicial righteousness, does not 
set aside their common relation to the bountiful Creator 
of all men, and to the God of boundless compassion and 
grace towards those who are sunk in guilt and misery. 
The threefold cord, which links them to the throne of 
God, cannot be broken. " The gifts and calling of God 
are without repentance." The love of the All- wise 
Creator to all His creatures is displayed in the very fact 
of their creation. It may be veiled for a time, but can- 
not be destroyed by the later unfolding of moral evil. 
And thus His judgments, when most awful, have to be 
tempered into strange harmony with this earlier revelation 
of His goodness. " I will not contend for ever, neither 
will I be always wroth : for the spirit should fail before me, 
and the souls which I have made/'' In like manner, the 
link between sorrow and misery, wherever found, and 
however caused, and the Divine compassion, must abide 
and endure. " God so loved the world, that he gave 
his only begotten Son " to be the propitiation for their 
sins. Our Lord is " the Lamb of God, who taketh away 
the sin of the world." When He stooped from His 

o 



194 ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 

glory, and became the Son of Man, He became the 
brother and the head of every man ; and the law, " thou 
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself/' was written in His 
heart. No mysterious depth in the perverseness of evil, 
and no revealed certainty of inexorable righteousness, 
when the Judge sits upon the throne of judgment, can 
ever contract this revealed grace of the Father and of the 
Son within narrower bounds ; so that sinners to whom 
the Son of God was given, for whom He bore the curse, 
and over whom there have been the patient broodings of 
God's infinite compassion, should cease, in their deepest 
shame, to be encircled evermore with the infinite com- 
passions of Him whose name is Love. 

One more remark, in closing, needs to be made, that 
no voice of the Spirit may seem to be passed over in 
silence. Our Lord has said of the guilty traitor, " Good 
were it for that man if he had not been born." The 
word is icaXov, and not aya66v. The best and highest 
state, as Greek philosophy saw and taught, is one in 
which these epithets are combined, the honourable and 
the good, or happiness united with honour, dignity, and 
glory. The state of lost souls is one, not of honour, but 
of deepest shame. In respect of honour, it were far 
better for them not to have been born. The shame of 
the creature, in contrast to the glory of the Creator, will 
be revealed in them for ever. But with regard to the 
good, as distinct from the honourable, no such declara- 
tion is once made. It would even seem to imply that 
the destructive power of evil, in their case, outweighed 



ON ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 195 

and surpassed the free bounty of their first creation, and 
all the stupendous riches of redeeming grace. May 
we not rather believe that their condition will be a 
mysterious paradox, an eternal contrast, where the fcaXbv 
has been reversed into utter shame through the perverse- 
ness of evil ; but the dya0bv remains, because the love of 
the Creator, and the grace of the Redeemer, even in the 
depth as well as the height, are mightier than the 
mightiest power of the creature for self-destruction and 
utter ruin ? 

So also it is written, " He shall have judgment without 
mercy, that showed no mercy/'' These words may well 
describe the stern severity of God's anger, while pride or 
unmercifulness remains uncrushed in the hardened sinner. 
But when that prostration of the rebellious will is com- 
plete, under a doom solemn and irreversible, then may the 
rest of the statement be also fulfilled, — " mercy rejoiceth 
against judgment."" The doom itself, by the nature of the 
sinful spirit, and the truth of the Divine threatening, will 
be irreversible, and the contrast between the saved and 
the lost an everlasting separation. And still, out of the 
depths of their shame there may dawn such a vision of 
the perfect goodness of the Most High, such a discovery 
of the wisdom, holiness, and love which have borne with 
a world of rebels, such strange and vast unfoldings of 
victorious goodness through the ages to come, as may 
become a message of real mercy to those who abide for 
ever under the solemn sentence of the Most High. God 
shall then be " all in all/' when the depths of that fiery 



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